Digital meets Culture

Form more information visit the Tender section of the website

Open Dialogue for the preparation of the PREFORMA tender

PREFORMA aims to ensure the establishment of a process of Open Dialogue between the memory institutions and the technology providers who develop the software. The memory institutions will define the functional requirements of the tender based on the outcome of the Open dialogue.

This process has already started and the following activities have been planned:

The establishment of a task force to build consensus on the preservation formats that will be validated by the PREFORMA toolset, focusing in particular on the audiovisual domain (PDF/A for texts and TIFF/JPEG2000 for still images are already agreed).
An open consultation about the tender to get an understanding of the needs of the individual memory institutions as to conformance checking and agree on a joint user model that integrates all the individual requirements.
The organization of a workshop in Brussels on the 5^th of March 2014 targeted to the memory institutions to agree on the functional requirements and technical specifications of the reference implementation tools to be developed in PREFORMA.
The organisation of a public Information Event in Brussels on the 4^th of April 2014 for exchange and consultation with potential suppliers and to present the PREFORMA call for tender.
The organisation of a networking session at the EGI Community Forum in Helsinki on the 21st of May 2014 as an additional opportunity to present the PREFORMA call for tender to the people attending the event and to collect feedback.

This page will be continuously updated with the progress and the outcomes of this process.

Contact us at info@preforma-project.eu to obtain more information on the procurement or to ask for any specific question. We will make sure that your requests will be forwarded to all the relevant parties and that they will be taken into account in the design of the tender functional requirements and technical specification.

www.preforma-project.eu

PREFORMA website and blog launched!

PREFORMA website is now online at www.preforma-project.eu.

The website contains all information relevant to the project, including updates on the most important activities, contact details, information on how to join the community, and a detailed description of partner institutions and their contributions.

The website is complemented by a project blog hosted in the popular Digital Meets Culture online communication platform. The blog features news, articles and upcoming events related the project – automatically featured also on the website – and it helps to widen the communication of the project towards a larger audience, including both professional and general public.

The project has simultaneously released the tagline that will represent the project together with the logo: Future Memory Standards.

Padua, 13-14 January 2014

PREFORMA Kick-Off Meeting

On January 13th and 14th 2014, the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova will host the PREFORMA Kick-off Meeting.

PREFORMA aims to address the challenge of implementing good quality standardised file formats for preserving data content in the long term. The main objective is to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity tests of files to be ingested into archives.

PREFORMA – PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives – is Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project co-funded by the European Commission, under its FP7-ICT Programme.

The consortium of PREFORMA is composed by 14 partners, from 9 European countries, ranging from the North to the South of the EU. Its good geographic spread is also complemented by a good scientific and technical spread of competences and expertise.

The Swedish National Archives is the coordinator of the project and leads the CSA-Sustainable Network WP. Promoter Srl is the Technical and Communication Coordinator, while the University of Padova is the Scientific Coordinator.

Project website: www.preforma-project.eu

Registration to the kick-off meeting (Reserved to the project partners)

Melbourne, Australia, 6-10 October 2014

iPRES 2014 Conference

The 11th annual iPRES conference on digital preservation will be held from 6 to 10 October 2014 at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

The iPRES 2014 Coordinating Committee invites contributions of papers, posters, demonstrations, tutorials and workshops related to the increasingly broad topic of digital preservation.

The 2014 conference is canvassing contributions along two primary axes – Research and Innovative Practice.
Contributions should address at least one of the following topics:

Infrastructure

intelligent and secure storage
scalability
complex formats
large web data sets
software and hardware dependencies
system architectures and requirements
distributed and cloud-based implementations

Communities

institutional contexts for preservation
personal archiving
collaboration
collection content profiling

Strategic environment

legislative, strategy and policy enablers (eg preservation intent, pre-conditioning)
standards
local, regional and national approaches

Preservation strategies and workflows

migration
emulation
metadata
risk measurement and management
preservation planning and actions
acquisition and ingest
access provision

Specialist content types

web
GIS
digital art
primary, scientific, sensor data
governmental and medical records
technical and scientific processes
engineering models and simulation
corporate processes and recordkeeping

A digital preservation marketplace

products
tools
services
registries
understanding authenticity and integrity
exploitation of computationally aware data from our digital repositories
business models
added value
benefits
exploitation
long tail

Theory of digital preservation

models
empirical testing
measuring semantic shift

Case studies and best practice

implementations
repositories
issues and wins

Training and education

educational needs
curricula
innovative offerings

For more information visit the conference website: http://ipres2014.org/

Brussels, 23 January 2014

Info and Networking day on the new PCP and PPI funding opportunities in H2020

The European Commission organises an Info and Networking day on the new PCP and PPI funding opportunities in Horizon 2020 which will take place on 23 January 2014 in Brussels.

Horizon 2020 offers in 2014-2015 around 140 Million EURO of EU support for PCP and PPI for procurers across various domains such as European Research Infrastructures, ICT, Health, Food / Bioeconomy, Energy, Transport and Climate Change / Environment.

EC presentations at the Info day will focus on:

Funding modalities of PCP and PPI support in Horizon 2020 (including also the differences between support for PCP/PPI in Horizon 2020 compared to before in FP7 / CIP).
New possible synergies between Horizon 2020 and ESIF (Structural Funds) funding for PCP and PPI projects.
How to prepare/submit a proposal for a call for CSAs for networking procurers or for a PCP/PPI Cofund action (new submission system, proposal template, evaluation criteria, etc).
And of course there will be also in particular additional info about the open PCP/PPI related calls in the ICT domain (ICT-35(f) and ICT-36 under the ICT LEIT work program)…

Link to the agenda and registration form for the Info day: http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/pcp/events_en.html

http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/RICHES-General-Presentation_Pisa-4-Dec-2014.pdf

RICHES General Presentation

Brussels, 31 January 2014

OpenForum Academy Event

On 31 January 2014, during an event organised by OpenForum Academy network in Brussels, the University of Skovde will present an overview of the EU FP7 PREFORMA project to raise an awareness of the project amongst participants.

Specifically, opportunities for small and large companies to become involved in the tender will be highlighted and discussed.

Openforum Academy (OFA, http://www.openforumacademy.org/) is a think tank with a broad aim to examine the paradigm shift towards openness in computing that is currently underway, and to explore how this trend is changing the role of computing in society.

OpenForum Academy is an independent programme established by OpenForum Europe. It has created a link with academia in order to provide new input and insight into the key issues which impact the openness of the IT market.

Cambridge & London, 28 April - 2 May 2014

Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age 2014

The first DiXiT camp took place in Cambridge/London from Sunday, 27 April 2014 – Friday, 2 May 2014. Its programme included the fifth MMSDA course, short for Medieval and Modern Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age.

DiXiT Camp 1 was a great success thanks to local organizers (esp. Peter Stokes and Elena Pierazzo), to excellent teachers and librarians and not least thanks to a splendid and enthusiastic group of participants comprising 13 DiXiT fellows and 18 additional PhD students. 9 participants have been generously supported by NeDiMAH.
Reports on both strands (medieval & modern manuscripts) will soon be published on the DiXiT blog website: http://dixit.hypotheses.org/
On the same blog DiXiT fellows will soon start to post reports on their individual research projects.

As for the upcoming DiXiT camps (Graz 14-20 Sept, Borås 8-13 Feb) and conventions (The Hague Sept/Oct 2015, Cologne Mar/Apr 2016, Antwerp Sept/Oct 2016) we would like to include and involve more and more associated network partners as well as scholars and institutions from outside the network.

For the first time, the course run in two parallel strands: one on medieval and the other on modern manuscripts.

The course is an intensive training programme on the analysis, description and editing of manuscripts to be held jointly in Cambridge and London. It stresses the practical application of theoretical principles and gives participants both a solid theoretical foundation and also ‘hands-on’ experience in the cataloguing and editing of original medieval and modern manuscripts in both print and digital formats.

Download the Flyer here

More information on DiXiT here

DiXiT official website here

Brussels, 1-2 February 2014

PREFORMA @ FOSDEM Conference 2014

Representatives from the EU FP7 PREFORMA project will participate at FOSDEM 2014 in Brussels, which is the main European conference where open source communities meet, share ideas and collaborate.

During the conference the researchers will network with open source developers and projects in order to promote opportunities for open source development in the context of the PREFORMA project.

FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event organised by the community for the community. The goal is to provide open source software developers and communities a place to meet to:

get in touch with other developers and projects;
be informed about the latest developments in the open source world;
attend interesting talks and presentations on various topics by open source project leaders and committers;
to promote the development and the benefits of open source solutions.

For further details visti the Conference website.

Brussels, 10 February 2014

PREFORMA invited to the EC Concertation Meeting on PCP

On February 10th, 2014 the Innovation Unit of the European Commission is organising a concertation meeting for ongoing Pre-Commercial Procurement projects. This represents a good opportunity to collect information about good practices and to bring up problems or questions.

PREFORMA has been invited to the meeting and three representatives will participate and present the project: the Coordinator Borje Justrell from the Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet), the Communication Manager Antonella Fresa from Promoter Srl and Peter Pharow from Fraunhofer-Institut for Digital Media Technologie IDMT.

Download here the agenda of the meeting.