Tools

OPF Webinar: Securing funding for your digital preservation, with SPRUCE

Making the case to your organisation’s management, or to external funders, to adequately resource your digital preservation activities is not an easy task. Digital preservation is not always a straightforward sell. In this financial climate the justification for spending money has to be compelling and watertight. In this webinar Paul Wheatley will describe how to make the case for funding your digital preservation, with reference to the SPRUCE Project’s Digital Preservation Business Case Toolkit.

* Making a compelling case to fund digital preservation
* The Digital Preservation Business Case Toolkit from SPRUCE
* Getting started
* Other resources

There are twenty-five places available on a first come, first serve basis. Registration is now open to OPF members.

Date: 
27 November 2013
Event Types: 
Webinar

SCAPE/OPF Continuous Integration update

 

As previously blogged about by Carl we now have virtually all SCAPE and OPF projects in Continuous Integration; building and unit testing in both Travis CI and Jenkins.

  • Travis compiles the projects and executes unit tests whenever a new commit is pushed to Github, or when a pull request is submitted to the project.
  • Jenkins builds are generally scheduled once per day. After a build the software has its code quality analysed by Sonar
Submitted by William Palmer on 1 November 2013 – 10:19am

Fund it, Solve it, Keep it (with SPRUCE)

How to fund and solve your digital preservation challenges

What will the event do for me?

This event will help to make your digital preservation more effective by demonstrating the best community focused approaches and results from the JISC funded SPRUCE Project. You’ll be hearing from the SPRUCE Team experts and from the practitioners and developers who have been tackling digital preservation challenges in targeted SPRUCE Award projects. We’ll also be hearing from you, so we can take on board what you need from our future work.

  • If you’re taking your first steps in preserving your digital assets we will demonstrate how to get started, where to get help, and how to make the case to resource your work more effectively.
  • If you’re already engaged in digital preservation we’ll show how your efforts can be supported more effectively with help from the community.

Key topics we will be covering include:

  • Securing funding for your digital preservation activities with the Digital Preservation Business Case Toolkit
  • Community approaches to solving digital preservation challenges
  • SPRUCE guides on how to assess your digital collections
  • Stabilising data stored on obsolete hand-held media
  • Results from the SPRUCE Award Projects

Who is this for?

Practitioners, developers and middle managers who are engaged (or would like to be engaged) in preserving their organisation’s digital assets.

When, where and how do I register?

The free event will take place at 11am on the 25th November at the brand new Library of Birmingham. Register your attendance here. Please note that anyone who registers for the event and then fails to attend without giving at least one week of notice will be liable for a £50 cancellation charge. Places are limited, so please don’t waste them!

Date: 
25 November 2013
Event Types: 
Conference
Link: 
Event information

Scalable Environments for File Format Identification and Characterisation

This webinar provides an introduction to file format identification and characterisation tools which have been developed or extended as part of the SCAPE Project.

It covers the basic principals of file format identification, and shows how format information drives digital preservation workflows.

Participants will be given an overview of file format registries, and their role in digital preservation, and will see demonstrations of identification and characterisation tools including fido and tika.

We will provide a Virtual Machine image with samples files and step-by-step worksheets to allow participants to try out these exercises for themselves after the webinar with support.

Learning outcomes (by the end of the webinar and exercises, participants
will be able to):

  • Distinguish between different file types and identify the requirements for characterising each of them.
  • Carry out identification and characterisation experiments on example files.
  • Compare characterisation and identification tools and understand their advantages and disadvantages when used in different scenarios.


Session Lead: Carl Wilson, OPF
Date: Friday 25 October
Time: 12 noon BST / 13:00 CET
Duration: 1 hour (please note this includes the presentation and demonstrations. Practical exercises can be carried out after the webinar).

There are 25 places available which will be allocated on a first come, first serve basis.

Date: 
25 October 2013
Event Types: 
Webinar
Link: 
Webinar registration

POSTPONED Digital Preservation Without Tears

The ‘Digital Preservation Without Tears’ Mash-up will appeal to collection owners and developers. The programme offers two connected strands – a hack and a sprint.

  • In the hack, developers will have two days to develop, test and enhance practical tools for digital preservation. Collection owners will be invited to bring problem elements of their digital collections for analysis using the latest digital forensic and characterisation tools. This will help the collection owners develop practical workflows for management and preservation while helping developers spot and refine solutions that will enable better tools.
  • In the sprint, collection owners will examine current thinking on digital preservation policy and planning in their organisations. Collections owners will present their own digital preservation policies and will be invited to assess these against each other and against emerging good practice, providing a managed environment for policy development and peer review. Collection owners will then be invited to pool their wisdom to create a Digital Preservation Policy Building Toolkit that can be shared.

This mashup will:

  • Provide a forum for practical problem solving for analysis of digital collection
  • Provide a forum for discussion, review and development of digital preservation policy
  • Bring together developers and collection owners from across the DPC and OPF to address shared challenges
  • Extend and enhance the corpus of digital preservation tools
  • Deliver a simple beginners’ guide for the development of digital preservation policies

This event will be of interest to:

  • Collections managers, librarians, curators and archivists and policy makers in all institutions with an interest in digital preservation
  • Techies, tools developers, IT officers, database managers and systems analysts with an interest in long term data management
  • Innovators and researchers digital preservation
  • Vendors and providers of digital preservation services
  • CEO’s CTO’s and CIO’s seeking to develop institutional capacity for digital preservation

Everyone coming needs to bring a lap top computer. In addition:

  • Collection owners will need to bring a data set that is giving them trouble in terms of characterisation or identification and be prepared to present their institutional policy on digital preservation
  • Techies will need to tell us about the skills they have and bring a knowledge of existing digital forensic and characterisation tools

Also, because elements of the mash-up include peer-review of existing practice, participants need to understand and consent to working under ‘Chatham House Rules’ for parts of the programme.

Places are strictly limited and should be booked in advance. Priority will be given to DPC and OPF members who can attend at no cost. Non-members are welcome at a cost of £150 pounds per person. Lunch and refreshments are provided on three days and dinner on the first night. Accommodation will be recommended but is not included in the cost. Register online at: http://www.dpconline.org/events

Can’t make it?

Parts of the event will be available as a webcast. We’ll publish the slides after each event and will tweet live from the event using the hashtag #DPnoTears.

Event Types: 
Hackathon
Link: 
Register for Digital Preservation Without Tears

FIDO News

Maurice de Rooij's picture

Here’s a little newsbulletin about FIDO, the open source file format identification tool of OPF.

It seems that the use of FIDO is growing the last few months. I am getting responses by e-mail and through the Github issuetracker from all over the world, ranging from requests for help, giving suggestions for improvement and even some bugfixes. Thanks and please keep them coming!

Submitted by Maurice de Rooij on 18 September 2013 – 10:27am

Optimising archival JP2s for the derivation of access copies

Johan van der Knijff's picture

Like many other organisations that are using JPEG 2000, the KB produces two representations of most of its digitised content (newspapers, books, periodicals):

Submitted by Johan van der Knijff on 19 August 2013 – 11:22am

Identification of PDF preservation risks: the sequel

Johan van der Knijff's picture
Submitted by Johan van der Knijff on 25 July 2013 – 12:57pm