Welcome to the Winter edition of the Open Preservation Foundation newsletter! In this issue, learn about our new software releases, the OPF OAG, the PAR working group, our webinar round-up and what's new from the community blog!

OPF Advisory Group Meeting 

The most recent meeting of the OAG took place last week on the 7th December at Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris. 

The OAG is a forum designed to update OPF members on our work and give them a greater say on the development of our tools, special interest groups, and knowledge-sharing initiatives. We were joined both in-person and virtually by participants from around the world. A report on the meeting will be available shortly. We would like to extend a big thank you to everyone who attended, and to Bibliothèque nationale de France for kindly hosting the event.

The next meeting will be held prior to the AGM in Finland on the 23rd May 2023.

Webinar round-up

This quarter, we have hosted a series of webinars exploring a range of technical and practical issues facing our digital preservation community. 

Tim Allen presented Embedded files: Risk, Challenges and Options, in September. He offered an update on a taxonomy of embedded file types and some eye-opening examples across a broad range of formats of what can be found inside your files, and sparked an interesting discussion. 

In November, Marjolein Steeman (The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision), Sam Alloing (The Dutch Royal Library) and Asbjørn Skødt (The Danish National Archives) presented A Comparison of Recommended File Formats and the New Dutch Method for File Format Assessment. They first presented the international comparison table of recommended file formats, followed by a tutorial of the DDHN’s Smart Guide - to great response. You can find out more about the file formats here and the tutorial here, or by joining the OPF working group. 

Earlier today, the OPF hosted The Experimental Kitchen: A Demonstrative Webinar. We invited our members to present their work and passion projects in a ‘demonar’, an ‘experimental kitchen’ for them to start collectively 'plating up' some of their 'half cooked' ideas to one another for feedback and positive reinforcement. All agreed that it was a great way of sharing ideas and have asked us to organise more of them.

Coming soon!

We have more great webinars coming up this Winter! On the 25 January we have veraPDF, To Infinity + Beyond Validation! Users of veraPDF will be familiar with validating PDF/A documents of different flavours. They may not be so familiar with some of the software’s extended functionality. This webinar showcases some of these features.

ICRFF

This autumn, there was an open call to submit or update your institution’s file format policy in the OPFs comparison of recommended file formats spreadsheet. This resource enables users to compare accepted and preferred file formats at a high level across different types of cultural and scientific institutions across the world. It is not intended to be used alone as a policy. 

There were several new additions, across various sectors, which have prompted both discussion and reflection at the International Comparison of Recommended File Formats (ICRFF) working group. Currently there are 27 institutions that have contributed to the table - and this number is continuously growing. We encourage all organisations to get involved how they feel able, and will welcome you with open arms. 

PAR working group

The Preservation Action Registries (PAR) project is working to facilitate the exchange of best practices in the digital preservation community. The PAR group recently released v1.1 of their data model and API intended to allow different registries and repository systems to share policy and preservation actions. They have also developed a REST API endpoint for viewing file format information from Wikidata using PAR schemas. 

Software releases

This quarter has been a busy one for software releases! Firstly, in October we issued the Jpylyzer 2.1 release. The maintenance release consisted of minor changes, including detailed reporting of packet level codestream markers, bug fixes, documentation improvements and improvements to the testing and release process. Read more here.

We expect FIDO 1.6 to be out later this week, and JHOVE 1.28 in the coming weeks.

Learn more about our open source digital preservation toolset.

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.

OPF Director, Micky Lindlar wrote about the success of PREMIS this past year in PREMIS For All, For Good, Forever!. Followed by metadata strategist Karin Brendenberg’s PREMIS awarded the DPC 20th Anniversary Award which documents the road to PREMIS winning the DPC 20th Anniversary Award. Micky has also recently written a blog about 'Trouble-shooting PDF validation errors – a case of PDF-HUL-38'.

OPF Chair, Remco Van Veenendaal called out for Wanted: digital preservation and archival jokes. 

World Digital Preservation Day saw some brilliant additions. Ross Spencer reflects on the question ‘what exactly does a corporate entity need from an archive?’ and his work at Ravensburger in, Calling the OPF’s corporate archives and archivists! Ross has also recently published a blog  talking about 'Harmony in the world of digital preservation' with a call to action for the community!

OPF’s Community Officer Georgia Moppett also published two blogs on World Digital preservation Day, Arguing the case for Digital Preservation: Are you a ‘passavist’?, and Making a case for Digital Preservation. 

Yannick Grandcolas wrote a blog on the collaborations between Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) in La Préservation Numérique en Temps de Guerre, and Digital Preservation in Wartime.


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.

OPF AGM