Coming up in the next month are two excellent OPF hackathons: the “Emulation, learn from the experts” hackathon and the “CURATEcamp 24 hour worldwide file id hackathon“.

We have recently started some research at Archives New Zealand to investigate the best approaches for appraising, transferring (where relevant) and preserving databases.

As part of this research we will be undertaking case studies of a number of databases. The case studies will involve a number of aspects including where possible testing one or more preservation approaches on each database. We hope to publish the results of this research at the end of the project.

Maintaining the ability of an organisation or user to be able to “open” or “render” a file or set of files is one of the core digital preservation challenges. The Rendering Matters Report outlines the results of research conducted at Archives New Zealand investigating whether changes are introduced to th

Niklas is finishing up his time here at Archives New Zealand and we are pleased to be able to announce the first publication of code to come out of his work to identify office files with linked dependencies.

Many office suites and other applications allow the embedding of information in them via a link to another file. The use of linked spreadsheets is common amonst data intensive agencies and large documents are often managed through linking multiple office documents to form a single final product.

Emulation requires disk images to be provided and used for the main hard drive of emulated computers.