Open Preservation Foundation
andThe Preservation Action Registry

Martin Wrigley, Executive Director, OPF

Martin Wrigley

30+ years experience delivering
software and solutions - mostly inMobile Telecoms
10+ years experience ofmanaging a membership driven
open source association
OPF Executive Director since
September 2017
Expanding my knowledge of thefiner points of Digital
Preservation2

Who is OPF?
• A not for profit, global membership association providing
stewardship of open-source tools for the digital preservation
community.

• Founded in 2010 to sustain the results of the EU PLANETS
project• The OPF reference toolset now includes veraPDF, JHOVE andmoreWhat is OPF’s purpose?
OPF Vision
Open sustainable digital preservation
OPF Mission
Enabling shared solutions for effective and efficient digital preservation; theOpen Preservation Foundation leads a collaborative effort to create, maintainand develop the reference set of sustainable, open source digitalpreservation tools.
This set of tools (including software and standards) enables organisations toevaluate, validate, document, mitigate risk, and process digital content to bepreserved in line with desired policies and community best practice.
Values• Open• Member driven• Collaborative & Inclusive• Innovative

Who are OPF members?
Austrian Institute of Technology
British Library
Bibliotheque Nationale de FranceGoportis
International Atomic Energy Archives
Jisc
Koninklijke Bibliotheek
Det Kgl. Bibliotek
Nationaal Archief
The National Archives UK
Nasjonalbiblioteket
Rigsarkivet
Ex Libris
Rahvusarhiiv

Latvijas Nacionala bibliotekaÖsterreichische
Nationalbibliothek
Preservica
Yale University LibraryAlbert-Ludwigs Universitat
University of North Carolina
PorticoPSNC (Poznan Supercomputing &Networking Centre)
Artefectual
Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal
Arcsys Software

We welcome any organisation with a mandate to preserve digital informationfor the long termWhat does OPF do?
••••••••••

Community Knowledge
Sharing knowledge
Develop the OPF reference toolset
Deliver to development roadmaps
Community engagement
Webinars and training
Interest Groups and Tech Clinics
OPF Software Maturity Model
Hosting community services e.g. COPTR
Website, blogs, events

OPF – Digital Preservation Knowledge and Tools

Practical Tools- Open Source- ReferenceToolset

OPF Reference Toolset – generic processDerivative check tools
Maintained through OPF
xcorrsound WAV, MP3Transform
Database archiving /Extraction toolsRecommended by OPF
SIARD (SQL database toXML format)*Qualitycheck
derivative

OPF Tool Mapping
Validation
polices

Fix/transform(migrate…)

ValidateTThing

Packagingpolices

Fix/transform*(redact…)

T

Identify
MetaThing

Disk image
explosion/analysis
Recommended byOPF

M
T+

CharacteriseM
T+

Fix/transform*

Package,
Quality Assurance,Review,
Cross Check

Put into a Box(turn into an AIP)

Periodic
re-checkContainer
explosionrecursive

Quality & Cross
Check polices

Characterisation
polices

Identification tools
Maintained through OPF

Validation and Characterisation
tools
Maintained through OPF

Information Packagingtools
TBA

PDF/A
Format Sniff
Recommended by OPF
DROID
PRONOM
FILE

PDF, JPEG, WAV,PNG, WARC, AIFF,UTF8 TEXT, XML,HTML, GZIP, ASCIITEXT, MP3, GIF,JPEG2000(DPF Manager)
TIFF
TIFF module
JPEG2000

Cross Check tools
TBA

Quality check tools
E-ARK CEF SIP validator

How do OPF projects work?
FUNDINGOPF membershipDonations
Project income

PLANNING (PRODUCTBOARD)
Prioritise fixes and features
Define the release
Manage the roadmap

REQUIREMENTS & COMMUNITYFEEDBACK
Bug reports and new feature
requests
Hack day activities
Code contributions
Input from OPF interest groups
Contribution of test files
Improvements to documentation

DEVELOPMENT &TESTING
GitHub for OS development
Build a set of test data
Continuous integration
Quality Assurance

FINAL TEST & RELEASE

Production release
Freely available to community
Patches (essential fixes)

Preservation Action Registry

PAR Background: The problem• Users want the best advice, wherever it comes fromo Identification, property extraction, validation, migration,
rendering, tools• Many sources for current ‘best practice’o Products such as Preservica & Archivematica
o Practitionerso Academicso Specialists- but they don’t talk to each other effectively

12

Background: Motivation and Objectiveso To provide a mechanism to exchange good practiceinformation between organisations andpreservation system suppliers regardless of which
system they use.
o Explicitly: To provide compatibility/ interoperability

between JISC RDSS project systems.
However:
It is not a single ‘Best Practice’
It is not ‘one registry to rule them all’13

Background: Jisc RDSS Project
Development of a multi-vendor shared services platform led todiscussions of interoperability of format policies (i.e. “preservationactions”) between preservation systems.

FPR

14

Background: Project Conception
A JISC funded project to initiate the process to deliver
benefits to RDSS users
Arkivum, Preservica and Artefactual as RDSS productsuppliers
Open Preservation Foundation as respectedindependent shared DP technology supplier

15

Digital Preservation Actions
Preservation is not just about file formats, it’s about making sense of datarequiresincludesresearchdataset object

Bunch of files

preservation
actions

The specific action depends on the context, and the policies.
– what action is being taken and why? What is the business rule?
Fromresearch
dept

Convert todesiredformat

Today - preservation actions are not portable across systems(e.g. A rchivematica, Preservica, others)
16Current Registry (In)compatibility
Preservica Registry

Archivematica FPR?

17

Common Language?

?

18

What have we produced and why?
Conceptual Model● Common framework for everyone● Language between preservation systems● Still under definition…

Json Schemas● Formal definition of the conceptual model● Machine readable, used in API payloads● Used to test and validate interoperability

API● Common interface for preservation systems● Well defined way to exchange information

Executable Digital
Preservation Actions● Cross-platform way to deploy/run tools● Unambiguous and vendor independent

Proof of Concept● Reference implementation to share● Make the idea really work between Preservica andArchivematica

19

PAR Conceptual Model

20

JSON schemas
••
•
•
•
•

Tool
ActionAction Type
FormatProperty
Business Rule21

APIs

https://github.com/JiscRDSS/rdss-par/tree/master/api
22

Executable Tool Definitions• Machine readable spec for running a toolo Tool command lineo Parameters and flagso Inputs and outputs
o Pre and post processing

Fixity check

Property extraction23

Next steps• OPF coordinationo Define project deliverables and stages in more detail• More use cases demonstrating real benefits• Looking for more organisations to be involved• Extend the conceptual model to more practicalcases that involve more organisations
Make PAR useful to communicate good practice
between systems and organisations
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Join OPF today!
For more information get in touch…
martin.wrigley@openpreservation.org
http://openpreservation.org/
https://github.com/openpreserve@openpreserve
Newsletter: www.openpreservation.org/subscribe/
For more info on PAR go towww.openpreservation.org/about/projects/par