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Welcome to the Autumn edition of the Open Preservation Foundation newsletter! In this issue, learn about our new software releases, the OPF AGM, the PAR working group, our webinar round-up and what's new from the community blog!
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Ravensburger AG becomes newest member of OPF
 In July, we welcomed Ravensburger AG as our newest member. They represent an exciting new segment for the OPF membership, demonstrating the vital need for long term preservation in diverse industries and arenas. Ravensburger AG are working on various concept strategies to embed digital preservation within the company culture across international boundaries.
They join more than 30 organisations from around the world that share a commitment to open, sustainable digital preservation. Learn more about the benefits of OPF membership.
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OPF AGM August 2022
 On 30 August, we were pleased to welcome OPF members from around the world to our Annual General Meeting, where we shared our achievements from over the past year and discussed our plans for the future.
During the official business, Peter May and Paul Stokes retired from the board of directors by rotation in accordance with our Articles of Association and were unanimously re-elected. Anna De Sousa was also officially appointed to the board. The annual accounts were presented by Paul Stokes.
We hope to be able to catch up with our friends and colleagues in-person for the next AGM, in Finland on the 24th and 25th May 2023.
The slides and minutes are available on our website (member login required).
Save the date for the next OAG meeting!
The next OPF Advisory Group (OAG) meeting will be held on 7 December 2022, kindly hosted by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris. Please save the date if you would like to attend in person or online via zoom. Registration will open in due course.
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Webinar round-up
This quarter, we have hosted a series of webinars exploring a range of technical and practical issues facing our community of digital preservation practitioners.
Leontien Talboom, PhD Student, University College London/The National Archives UK, joined us in July to discuss Computational Access to Digital Collections. Our August webinar brought together a team of presenters from The National Archives UK to discuss PRONOM: The Centenary Year.
Most recently on 21 September, Tim Allison from NASA joined us to talk about Embedded files: Risk, Challenges and Options.
OPF members benefit from priority registration and exclusive access to our archive of webinar recordings. Any remaining places are made available to the community. Subscribe to our mailing list or follow us on Twitter to learn more.
Coming soon!
We have more great webinars coming up this Autumn! In October, we will be joined by staff from The National Library of Portugal to talk about Implementing a new digital library system at the National Library of Portugal: main challenges and improvements.
Visit our events page to see more of our upcoming webinars. If you are interested in presenting your work to the community in an OPF webinar, please get in touch.
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Tech clinic
The next OPF members' tech clinic will take place on Tuesday 11th October. Topics for tech clinics can include:
- getting started with OPF tools (e.g. installation and basic usage)
- help with integrating open source tools into local automated workflows and systems
- investigating problems and issues with open source tools
- assistance with open source development best practises
- general software development advice.
We invite OPF members to book using the form sent out via the members' mailing list.
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PAR working group
The Preservation Action Registres (PAR) project has just released v1.1.0 of the PAR API. This comprises some model and API changes to accommodate nested format family structures as used in Wikidata’s model. There are also some extra filter parameters to make retrieving relevant results easier. This was done during the development of a PAR REST endpoint for the Wikidata for Digital Preservation data: https://wikidp.parcore.org/par/ui/. The PAR consortium is planning to hold a virtual road mapping event during Autumn 2022 to plan the next phases of PAR development.
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Software releases
This quarter has been a very busy one for software releases! Firstly, following on from the veraPDF 1.22 release candidate for community testing back in August, this month we have issued the full veraPDF 1.22 release. The release is made up of enhancements, technical maintenance and bug fixes. Read more about it here.
Equally, we were pleased to announce that a maintenance release candidate for jpylyzer 2.1 became available for community testing in August. Jpylyzer is an open source validator and feature extractor for JP2 images, and part of the OPF reference toolset.
Also in August, an updated Fido 1.6 RC5 release candidate was made available for download and community testing. It contained work necessary to make automatic signature updating work properly. Read more here.
Finally, a path release candidate for JHOVE 1.26 became available in July. You can read the release notes here. This release fixed a packaging issue with the first 1.26.0 release.
 Learn more about our open source digital preservation toolset.
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What’s new on the OPF community blog?
 Our blogs and news items explore a range of topics from case studies and best practice to tools and project news.
In a recent post, Charlotte Armstrong, OPF Content Manager, talks about Diversity, equality and inclusion at OPF and Georgia Moppet, OPF Community Officer, explains How to use GitHub, and why it matters if you use OPF tools.
OPF Director, Remco Van Veenendaal, also wrote a blog post about the OPF Archives Interest Group (AIG), AIG is dead, long live the AIG!, and what it achieved in its 6 years of existence.
Finally, we were delighted to announce that Becky Wilson (formerly Becky McGuinness) had been chosen by our Board of Directors as the latest recipient of the OPF Lifetime Personal Membership Award.
The OPF blog is a great way to stay connected and share your work with a welcoming community of practitioners and policymakers from organisations at all stages of their digital preservation journeys. Sign up for a free account or contact us with any questions.
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Meet Anna De Sousa
Tell us a bit about yourself and your role
I’m the Senior Digital Archivist, Team Leader at The National Archives Kew, where I’ve worked since 2015. My team and I are responsible for a number of areas, but at its core we’re responsible for ensuring that digital transfers of Public Records from Government departments and Public Inquiries meet our metadata requirements and are preserved and made available to the public. We also look after PRONOM, our online technical registry providing impartial and definitive information about file formats and DiAGRAM, a graphical risk assessment model. My role covers operational technical work, relationship management, business analysis and team management and development. It’s the variety and ability to affect meaningful change that has kept me here for so long.
How did you get here? What was your path into digital preservation?
I made a somewhat unconventional career change into Archives in my thirties, deciding to do a MA in Archives & Records Management at UCL in 2013. When I had to pick a dissertation subject I chose how archives decide on a format for preservation for audio-visual archive collections, which then set me on a path to digital preservation. I had a lovely six months at the Sound and Vision Technical Services department at the British Library covering a secondment, then I moved to The National Archives Digital Archiving department. Like a lot of people in this field it’s been a case of learning and evolving on the job.
Read the rest of the interview with Anna here.
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With special thanks to our gold members
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