WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

This session will present to the whole digital preservation community – open source community, developers, standardization bodies and memory institutions – the new opportunities offered by the pre-commercial-procurement launched by PREFORMA. The aim of the call for tender, which will be published by the end of May, is the development and deployment an open source software licensed reference implementation for file format standards aimed for any memory institution (or other organisation with a preservation task) wishing to check conformance with a specific standard. This reference implementation will consist of a set of modular tools, which will be validated against specific implementations of specifications of standards relevant to the PREFORMA project and used by the European memory institutions for preserving their different kind of data objects. In order to demonstrate effectiveness (and refine) these tools, they will be developed in an iterative process with multiple releases and with a number of experiments with ‘real’ data sets (files) from memory institutions during each iteration. Media types covered by the tender are: documents, images, audio-visual records.

The session will be interactive to allow the participants to ask questions and provide feedback.

DATE AND VENUE

Wednesday 21st of May, 2014 – from 11:00 until 12:30 am.

Helsinki University, Main Building.

PROGRAMME

Presentation of PREFORMA call for tender

• Introduction to the PCP Procedure (Borje Justrell, Riksarkivet)
• How to participate to the tender (Antonella Fresa, Promoter Srl)
• The implementation phases: design, prototyping and testing (Peter Pharow, Fraunhofer)
• Open source projects (Bjorn Lundell, University of Skovde)
• Challenge brief (Bert Lemmens, Packed

Panel discussion (Moderators: Borje Justrell and Antonella Fresa; Panel members: Peter Pharow, Bjorn Lundell, Borje Justrell, Bert Lemmens)

• Open issues & new challenges when moving from traditional to digital curatorship
• Discussion

Open issues:

• Availability of test files beyond the PREFORMA consortium
• Industry dependencies (pro/cons)
• Thresholds for adopting conformance checking software by memory institutions
• Sustainable communities beyond PREFORMA -> business opportunities during and after the PREFORMA project
• Risks for loosing data

New challenges when moving from traditional to digital curatorship:

• Are identified standards the right ones? (open standards vs de facto standards)
• Standards to be identified in a next phases
• Applying PCP instrument to other digital preservation issues or other research domains
• Migration challenges for memory institution on the long term (how to migrate vast collections of data to new preservation formats)
• How to provoke standardisation -> how to create a continuous stream of standardisation feedback to standardisation organisations

REGISTRATION

Alle attendees need to register to the EGI Community Forum main conference, at least for the day of the workshop. Registration is available at http://cf2014.egi.eu/registration/.

Furthermore we kindly ask to espress your interest to attend the networking session also using the form below.

THE PREFORMA PROJECT

The main objective of PERFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) – a Pre Commercial Procurement project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme – is to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity tests of files to be ingested into archives, through the development of a set of tools which enable this process to happen within an iteration that is under full control of the institutions.

For further information visit the PREFORMA Website and the PREFORMA Blog.

TARGET COMMUNITIES AND STAKEHOLDERS

• Memory institutions and cultural heritage organisations coordinating or representing them, that are involved in (or planning) digital culture initiatives.
• Developers contributing code for the PREFORMA tools as well as developers implementing the reference implementations in production software.
• Research organisations providing technical and expertise advice to cultural stakeholders.
• Standardisation bodies maintaining the technical specifications of the preservation formats covered in PREFORMA.
• Funding agencies, such as Ministries of Culture and national/regional administrations, that own and manage digitisation programmes and may endorse the use of the PREFORMA tools in the digitisation process.
• Best practice networks endorsing the use of open standards in creating and managing digital content.
• Other projects in the digital culture, e-Infrastructures and policy arenas.