The second year review of the FP7 Collaborative project SCAPE took place on April 18-19, 2013 at the AIT office in Vienna. As I have recently received the final written report of this review, I thought I would share some results with the preservation community.

The review covered the second project period, from February 2012 to January 2013. The meeting was chaired by the EC Project Officer responsible for SCAPE, Manuela Speiser. The review panel consisted of:

• Kevin Ashley – Director of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and returning panel member
• Raivo Ruusalepp – Consultant for the Estonian Business Archives, returning panel member and panel chair
• Wojtek Sylwestrzak – Director for Information Technology at ICM, Warsaw University and new panel member

Fourteen members of the SCAPE consortium presented the project results over two days. During the first day, the four technical Sub-projects reported on progress in the morning, and several live technical demonstrations were given in the afternoon. Highlights included a demonstration of round-trip content profiling (c3po), preservation planning (PLATO), and preservation plan execution with an integrated repository (RODA). On the second day, Takeup and Project Management were presented, during which we reported on a large number of publications and events in year two, as well as on our exemplary use of resources (13 on-time and mostly public Deliverables).

As a result of this outstanding collaborative work (and presentation of that work), SCAPE has received an "excellent" evaluation for the second year in a row.

From our Project Officer, Manuela Speiser:

“The overall assessment is that SCAPE has made excellent progress in the second year and has achieved all of its objectives in the areas of research, dissemination and management. All Deliverables from the 2nd period were accepted. We find SCAPE is driven by a motivated, cooperative consortium. The project is well managed, the use of resources is well-documented, and we have no major concerns.”

From the Review Committee:

“This year’s live demos did indeed dazzle us. We were pleased at your take on last year’s recommendations and we were especially happy with the improvements in dissemination and training (metrics on progress). We also appreciate your contributions to external open source projects (e.g. Tika, Fedora Commons). Please take our recommendations in the context of the very high standard you set for the project after the first Review. You are producing an impressive body of work, and we will continue to have very high expectations for the coming year.”

This feedback clearly indicates the successful second year of SCAPE, while providing valuable suggestions for our closing 15 months.

I would like to congratulate everybody for this excellent result, and thank you for your fantastic efforts, with a particular call-out to our Sub-project leads, our Technical Coordinator, and the SCAPE Project Office.