Open Planets Foundation

Preserving PDF: identify, validate, repair

Save the date! 1-2 September, Hamburg

Our next event focuses on the PDF file format and associated tools. The agenda is being defined by our members who have identified the following themes for the event:

  • Check the validity of the files and whether they are encrypted

  • Perform quality assurance checks after migration, using comparison tools

  • Investigate error messages, repair the problems, and build a knowledge base

  • Improve and document JHOVE validation

Olaf Drümmer, Chairman of the PDF Association will present the industry perspective and hold an open Q&A session.

The agenda is currently under consultation and will be available by the end of June.

Date: 
1 September 2014 to 2 September 2014
Event Types: 
Hackathon

New Memorandum strengthens global collaboration in digital preservation

Rebecca McGuinness's picture
The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) are delighted to announce a new memorandum of understanding that strengthens their ongoing collaboration to tackle digital preservation challenges.
Signed by OPF Executive Director, Ed Fay, and DPC Executive Director, William Kilbride, at the DPC offices in Glasgow, the MoU commits both two organisations to share knowledge and expertise, deliver joint events, and to support the development
Submitted by Rebecca McGuinness on 6 May 2014 – 10:26pm

Preservation Health Check: Monitoring Threats to Digital Repository Content

Rebecca McGuinness's picture

OCLC have published a report presenting the preliminary findings of its Phase 1 investigation of preservation monitoring as part of the Preservation Health Check (PHC) Project.

In collaboration with the Open Planets Foundation and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the project aims to evaluate the usefulness of the preservation metadata created and maintained by operational repositories for assessing basic preservation properties.

Submitted by Rebecca McGuinness on 30 April 2014 – 1:01pm

Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center Joins the OPF

Rebecca McGuinness's picture

We are delighted to welcome the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) as our latest affiliate member.

Submitted by Rebecca McGuinness on 29 April 2014 – 10:02am

SCAPE Webinar: ToMaR – The Tool-to-MapReduce Wrapper: How to Let Your Preservation Tools Scale

Overview

When dealing with large volumes of files, e.g. in the context of file format migration or characterisation tasks, a standalone server often cannot provide sufficient throughput to process the data in a feasible period of time. ToMaR provides a simple and flexible solution to run preservation tools on a Hadoop MapReduce cluster in a scalable fashion.
ToMaR offers the possibility to use existing command-line tools and Java applications in Hadoop’s distributed environment very similarly to a Desktop computer. By utilizing SCAPE tool specification documents, ToMaR allows users to specify complex command-line patterns as simple keywords, which can be executed on a computer cluster or a single machine. ToMaR is a generic MapReduce application which does not require any programming skills.

This webinar will introduce you to the core concepts of Hadoop and ToMaR and show you by example how to apply it to the scenario of file format migration.

Learning outcomes

1. Understand the basic principals of Hadoop
2. Understand the core concepts of ToMaR
3. Apply knowledge of Hadoop and ToMaR to the file format migration scenario

Who should attend?

Practitioners and developers who are:

• dealing with command line tools (preferrably of the digital preservation domain) in their daily work
• interested in Hadoop and how it can be used for binary content and 3rd-party tools

Session Lead: Matthias Rella, Austrian Institute of Technology

Time: 10:00 GMT / 11:00 CET

Duration: 1 hour

Date: 
21 March 2014
Event Types: 
Webinar
Link: 
Registration

Managing Digital Preservation: A SCAPE & OPF Seminar

This event will focus on the issues that managers face when implementing digital preservation in their organisation. It will explore the tension between stable business processes and the introduction of new technologies. Many managers have a responsibility for digital preservation but they are not necessarily a technical expert in the field.

Why attend?

  • Meet peers who are managing digital preservation
  • Learn about the approach of others who are embedding digital preservation in business practices
  • Hear about strategic approaches and policies in the field of digital preservation
  • Meet experts in digital preservation
  • Find out about research and development project developments

Who should attend?

Managers with a responsibility for digital preservation in large or small organisations

Date: 
2 April 2014
Event Types: 
Workshops & Training
Link: 
Registration

The National Archives of Estonia joins the Open Planets Foundation

Rebecca McGuinness's picture
We are pleased to welcome the National Archives of Estonia as our newest member.
Lauri Leht, Director of Digital Archives, explained:
“The National Archives of Estonia has joined Open Planets to collaborate in the field of digital preservation with other innovative members of the archiving community.
Submitted by Rebecca McGuinness on 28 January 2014 – 9:22am

OPF Webinar – From the Preservation Toolkit: JHOVE2

This webinar will give an overview of JHOVE2, the free and open-source tool for characterizing digital objects. It will cover the motivation for creating a second-generation version of JHOVE some of the new features of the tool, including the ability to perform not just format identification, validation, and feature extraction, but also assessment (a policy-based determination of the acceptability of a format instance, regardless of its validation). It will discuss JHOVE2’s more sophisticated data model of a format instance, embracing complex digital objects that can be composed of more than one file, each of a possibly different format. It will provide pointers on JHOVE2’s setup and use. It will briefly introduce the tool’s architecture, and ways in which it has been and can continue to be extended to include more formats, building on existing libraries and tools.

There are twenty-five places available on a first come, first serve basis.

Date: Friday 31 Janaury
Time: 09:00 EST / 14:00 GMT / 15:00 CET
Duration: 1 hour
Session Lead: Sheila Morrissey, Portico

Date: 
31 January 2014
Event Types: 
Webinar
Link: 
Register for the JHOVE2 webinar