Open Planets Foundation – A community hub for digital preservation

This tool needs some explanation of how it came about. At Nationaal Archief we were faced with various bottlenecks at ingest for our digital repository (which we call e-Depot). Characterization was one of them and when the OPF released the first prototype of FIDO we happily jumped on board for its development. Seeing the potential for significant speed increases, Nationaal Archief put in a substantial amount of work – freeing me for development of FIDO, leading to a wrapped Java version.

I attended the Practical Tools for Digital Preservation – A Hackathon event as a developer. As well as being enjoyable, I found this event useful and interesting.

I participated in the Open Planets Foundation / Digital Preservation Coalition hackathon event in York two weeks ago (27/09 – 29/09).  This is the third event of this type that I’ve attended this year, and so far each has been better than the previous.

As I already briefly mentioned in a previous blog post, one of the objectives of the SCAPE project is to develop an architecture that will enable large scale characterisation of digital file objects. As a first step, we are evaluating existing characterisation tools. The overall aim of this work is twofold.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on the design of a workflow that the KB is planning to use for the migration of a collection of (mostly old) TIFF images to JP2. One major risk of such a migration is that hardware failures during the migration process may result in corrupted images. For instance, one could imagine a brief network or power interruption that occurs while an image is being written to disk. In that case data may be missing from the written file.

We’ve been working away on defining and solving preservation problems at the 3 day AQuA Mashup event in Leeds. Today we wrapped up some new technical solutions and documented what we learnt. I think its not unrealistic to claim that most of the preservation issues and challenges have actually been centred around pretty straightforward problems.

Attendees at the first AQuA Project event in Leeds, UK, are spending 3 days tackling some preservation issues with their digital collections. We’re trying to answer questions such as:

The OPF is collaborating on an exciting new project that is aiming to enhance our ability to validate the condition of digital content. The AQuA Project is running two mashup events in April and June that will focus on developing our understanding of collection issues, such as bit rot or digitisation errors, and develop ways of automatically detecting these problems in large collections. Without automation, QA remains a costly and fallible manual effort.