Open Planets Foundation – A community hub for digital preservation

CHARTER MEMBERS

 

The AIT Austrian Institute of Technology is an Austrian research institute with a European format and focuses on the key infrastructure issues of the future. The AIT, which comprises five independent and performance-driven departments (Energy, Mobility, Health & Environment, Safety & Security and Foresight & Policy Development), works in close collaboration with industry and customers from public institutions, striving to increase their added value through innovation and new technologies.

AIT is strategically positioned as a key player in the Austrian and European innovation system by performing applied research for and enabling the market exploitation of innovative infrastructure related solutions. This functionality of “bridging the gap between research and technology commercialisation” is seen as a fundamental role for commercialisation of new technologies and strengthening economic development.

A further indication of AIT’s international competitiveness can be seen in the company’s intensive involvement in the research and technology programmes of the European Commission, a context in which the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology cooperates with other European research institutes and companies to establish new partnerships. This is an important means of exchanging application-oriented scientific findings with other stakeholders. The AIT Safety and Security Department, responsible for work in the Planets project, has a research field dedicated to the topic of digital preservation and will coordinate the Planets follow-up Integrated Project SCAPE.

The Austrian National Library (ONB) is the main scientific library of the Republic of Austria. With a history dating back to the 14th century, the Austrian National Library’s collections contain a significant part of the world’s cultural heritage. The library offers access to and professionally competent advice on its own holdings and links to international digital resources and digital library services. The Austrian National Library is required by media law to receive a copy of every publication appearing in Austria. Since 2009 the media law also includes legal deposit of online publications and the Austrian National Library has a legal mandate to harvest the Austrian web space on a regular basis. The library has a long tradition in the preservation of information and its obligations also comprise preserving and making accessible large quantities of deposited or harvested digital resources as well as the results from large-scale digitisation projects. In addition the Austrian National Library acts as a research centre and has been involved in numerous national and international research and development projects in the fields of digital preservation, digital libraries and digitisation. The library is strongly involved in the Commission’s European Digital Library initiative and a main contributor to Europeana. Recently, the library announced a large-scale digitisation cooperation with Google.

The British Library (BL) co-ordinated the Planets project and currently hosts the Open Planets Foundation. As the national library of the United Kingdom, the BL provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world’s largest and most comprehensive research collection. The British Library’s collections include 150 million items, in over 400 languages, from every era of written human history beginning with Chinese oracle bones dating from 300 BC, right up to the latest e-journals.

The Library passed a major milestone in November 2009 as the 500,000th item was added to the Digital Library System. The long-term storage facility now contains e-journals, digital sound recordings, born-digital material received through voluntary arrangements with publishers, more than 65,000 digitised 19th century books and more than three million pages from historic newspapers.

The Danish National Archives holds the records of the central bodies of the Danish government such as ministries and agencies as well as digital records for a number of municipalities and regions. Since the mid 1970s the National Archives has received transfers of digital records and was among the first national archives in the world to allow fully digital record keeping. The high level of digitization of the Danish administration means that the Danish National Archives each year receives hundreds of digital transfers of data and documents from the IT-systems of the agencies and other government bodies.

The Royal Library, Denmark is both a national library with an obligation to preserve Denmark’s digital cultural heritage, and a university library which serves the University of Copenhagen. This means the Royal Library both collects and preserves heritage data and is a legal deposit library for material published on the internet together with The State and University Library, Aarhus. This includes e-books and material from institutional repositories for Danish universities. Digital preservation activities at the Royal Library include everything from planning and collection to actual preservation using bit preservation and logical preservation. The Library is involved in a wide range of different digital preservation activities through its participation in research and development projects nationally and internationally. In digital preservation planning, the Library is best known for its work on cost models: http://www.costmodelfordigitalpreservation.dk. Web Archiving has been a major part of building its digital collections since 1998. The Library has been involved in developing the open source software NetarchiveSuite: http://www.netarchive.dk/netarchivesuite . The Royal Library is a member of IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium: www.netpreserve.org). The Library contributes to bit preservation both through research and as part of a Danish project which implements a national Bit Archive offering active bit preservation with differentiated services and bit safety levels. During the Planets project, the Library was involved in logical preservation. Currently, the Library is investigating what digital preservation means in a Library context, and the impact of this for preservation of different types of digital material.

 

The State and University Library, Denmark (SB) is an institution of the Danish Ministry of Culture. It functions as: National Library The SB is a legal deposit library. It receives a copy of all Danish publications, whether in printed or in digital form. It houses the national newspaper collection, the national media archive and is the national loan centre for public libraries and small special libraries.

University Library The State & University library is the main library of Aarhus University. In addition to its everyday services (lending, reference service etc.) the SB library buys books, periodicals and other materials for departmental libraries in the university. Through the use of a union catalogue these materials are also accessible to the public.

Research facility Like other libraries, archives and museums, which come under the Ministry of Culture, the SB is a research institution. Its main research fields are media, information and library research as well as research based on the library’s national and special collections.

Digital Library As a result of a new legal deposit law, effective from July 2005, the library has embarked on two initiatives; it has begun to digitise radio and television material broadcasted in Denmark in real time. This has already resulted in a digital radio/TV archive of over 600TB of data and over 1 million hours of broadcast material. Together with the Royal Library in Copenhagen it has also started to archive the Danish internet content. As a result of these two new initiatives, the library expects to add 200TB of data per year. The library is also engaged in digitising its audio collection; it currently holds more that 450,000 audio tracks in digital form.

Goportis is the name of the Leibniz Library Network for Research Information. The three libraries behind this partnership are: the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) in Hannover, the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED) in Cologne/Bonn and the German National Library of Economics (ZBW) in Kiel/Hamburg.

Goportis is the expert partner for the supply of electronic and printed full-text documents, licences, non-textual materials, digital preservation and Open Access. Apart from these fields of competence the three partners are responsible for acquiring, developing and making available scientific information, publications and other media in their specific subjects.

Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) inspires UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies. We invest heavily in research and development, offering over 18 million users access to quality assured resources through our secure network. We provide expert advice, help to save money through national content license agreements and work with colleges and universities to realise the potential of their existing technologies. Everything we do has one aim – to maintain the UK’s position as a global leader in education.

Microsoft Research’s involvement in Planets has been focused on identifying strategies for using Office Open XML standards for archiving and preservation of digital content. The Microsoft Office Open XML (Office OpenXML) formats represent a significant advance in representing information contained in textual documents, spreadsheets, and multimedia presentations in an open format, based on the XML standard. Microsoft believes that the use of the Microsoft Office Open XML formats can maximize long-term usage of documents and provide the value to the organisations and services concerned with archiving and preservation. 

Microsoft Research (MSR) was established in 1991 and has since developed into a unique entity among corporate research labs, balancing an open academic model with an effective process for transferring its research to product development teams. Microsoft researchers work across more than 55 disciplines, including areas that are directly related to the authoring, management, metadata creation, access security, and analysis of digital documents. Although most of the researchers pursue long-term goals that extend far beyond the current product cycles, they also work closely with product groups to transfer knowledge and help turn their discoveries into functional offerings. Through collaboration between Microsoft Research and Planets partners, the project has benefited  from technical expertise of Microsoft product teams and researchers who are actively engaging with the community on devising methods and tools for digital preservation.

The National Archives of The Netherlands has been involved in digital preservation since the beginning of the 1990s. It has a legal duty to provide access to and preservation of archival records through time, both paper and digital. It has longstanding experience managing and preserving paper records. It provides access to government records and other historical sources to a broad audience, also by using modern channels such as the world wide web. The Archive has been involved in development of a preservation testbed since 2000, the start of a joint venture with the Ministry of the Interior. This work has continued through into DELOS and a project on emulation in cooperation with the Dutch National Library.

The National Library of The Netherlands (KB) fosters the national infrastructure for scientific information and plays an important role in the permanent access to digital information at an international level. The e-Depot, the world’s first digital archiving system for academic publications, now contains more than 15 million articles (15 TB). The KB aims to scale up the e-Depot in the next years to contain 700 TB by 2013. As a national library in a smaller country with an international orientation, the KB is uniquely positioned to serve as a trustworthy steward for the scholarly record. Next to its national deposit collection, the e-Depot contains the digital archive of the Dutch academic institutional repositories, the Dutch web archive from 2008 onwards and the master archive of national digitisation projects. In the 1990’s the KB expanded its mission into the emerging international world of information provision. KB has made agreements with most of the key international publishers in the field of STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) including Elsevier, Springer and BioMed Central to have their online journals archived in the e-Depot for long term preservation and access. The KB intends to develop a sustainable business model for the e-Depot which will reflect both public and private responsibility for our digital scholarly and cultural heritage. The KB has been involved in many international research projects in the field of digital libraries and hosts the offices of The European Library (TEL) and Europeana. Currently, the KB is working on the development of a new digital preservation system, to be taken into production in 2012.

Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) supports teaching, learning and research in disciplines pursued by the University, conducts operations and programs ranging widely across the information domain, and engages in global efforts to advance library services. Key areas for innovation include:

• Scholarly e-publishing: HighWire Press
• Academic publishing: the Stanford University Press
• Digital archiving: the Stanford Digital Repository, LOCKSS /CLOCKSS, National Geospatial Digital Archive
• Digitization initiatives: book, map, and image scanning labs, media preservation lab, Parker on the Web, Google Book Search partnership
• Open Source development: Sakai, LOCKSS, Fedora, JHOVE2, AIMS
• Collection development: growing collections of print and electronic resources in all formats
• Learning spaces: 15 buildings with a variety of technology-enhanced spaces designed for individual study, collaborative work, and teaching
• Academic technology support: dedicated support for faculty and students using technology in research and teaching provided within departments, student residences, and within libraries across campus
• Research support: instruction and consultation provided in topics including basic & advanced research techniques, multimedia creation, use of numeric data and statistical software, and GIS

 

The National Library of Wales, 100 years old in 2007, is one of the oldest and most important of the national institutions in Wales. It is Wales’s pre-eminent library and archive. It is a legal deposit library and holds a wide range of media types, including books, periodicals and newspapers, archives and manuscripts, maps, pictures and photographs, sound and moving images and electronic material. Every year, it welcomes over 90,000 visitors to its building in Aberystwyth and receives over 1.4 million virtual visits. The NLW is committed to improving access to its building, collections and services. It has achieved this through the development of its visitor centre, its educational programme and the extension of its electronic resources.  Sustainable access is a priority for the NLW and it has developed strategies for the preservation of its analogue and digital holdings.

AFFILIATE MEMBERS

 

Vienna University of Technology Department of Software Technology and Interactive Systems addresses the broad spectrum of tools and methods which are relevant in the life cycle of software and information systems, beginning from abstract models for problem analysis to the implementation of software products. It has expertise among its staff of 63, in Data Engineering, Information & Knowledge Engineering, Process Engineering, Software Engineering and Web Engineering. It has long-standing experience in digital preservation research, specifically with respect to the evaluation and comparison of preservation strategies.

Current activities include both nationally as well as EU-funded research projects on formalizing, automating and scaling digital preservation solutions. Other activities include cultural heritage projects in cooperation with UNESCO and several museums, as well as digital preservation projects in cooperation with Secure Business Austria, a national competence center on security. It furthermore provides training and consulting services in the field of digital preservation.