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Remco van Veenendaal
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CoreTrustSeal recertification, not a piece of cake

On Tuesday, September 12, 2024, we received good news at the National Archives of the Netherlands (NAN). Our digital repository (e-Depot) received CoreTrustSeal certification for another three years and we are proud of that. But this recertification was not a piece of cake. More was needed than simply resubmitting our application from the previous time. In this blog, Marin Rappard and I share seven experiences and corresponding advice. 1) New requirements, new text CoreTrustSeal updates the CoreTrustSeal Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements, or the requirements for certification, every few years. We also had to deal with a new version. Clearer and...

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7 trends at iPRES 2024

Colleagues from OPF members KB National Library of the Netherlands (KBNL) and National Archives of the Netherlands, and of OPF’s partner organization Dutch Digital Heritage Network attended iPRES (ipres2024.pubpub.org) in Ghent in September. They share their highlights and insights*. 1: Is the cloud changing digital preservation? In recent years we have been hearing the word “cloud” more and more. It is often seen as a cheap and sustainable way to store data. A more nuanced view is that “There is no cloud. It’s just someone else’s computer”. Meanwhile, more and more preservation system vendors are moving to cloud storage. What...

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No Sabotage but Satisfaction

To strengthen mutual ties, show our love for our job and have fun together, employees of OPF members KB and NANeth made a parody of Benny Benassi’s Satisfaction for World Digital Preservation Day 2023. This blog describes 'the making of'.

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How we got preservation tools installed in our secured work environments

As part of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW), we at the National Archives of the Netherlands (NANeth) work with virtual Windows work environments. A number of standard applications are made available via this ‘Virtual Desktop Infrastructure‘ (VDI), such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat Reader and an internet browser. Installing applications yourself is not allowed. But suppose you want to get started with digital preservation tools. Like DROID for identifying file formats. Or JHOVE or veraPDF for file format validation. Then you can try to work around the security and find a ‘hack’. A better solution is to...

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Wanted: digital preservation and archival jokes

Please help me collect digital preservation and archival jokes. There are lots of jokes about librarians and libraries out there. (Where are the books about conspiracy theories? Right behind you!) But I can hardly find any about digital preservation or archives. I know for sure that this/these community/ies do have a lot of humour. But for some reason that humour has not been made sustainably accessible in trusted digital repositories. I had the wonderful opportunity to join the jury of the 2022 Digital Preservation Awards. Sometimes at the start of a meeting, while we were waiting for everyone to arrive,...

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AIG is dead, long live AIG!

On June 13, 2022, the OPF Archives Interest Group (AIG) ceased to exist. What started on March 7, 2016 with a kick-off call, resulted in a report about significant properties of spreadsheets in 2021. But looking back, it was more than just work. It was also an “inspiration group”, as AIG member Kati Sein (National Archives of Estonia) voiced it. As former chair of the AIG, I think the title of this blog is warranted. Spreadsheets In 2016, National Archive members of the Open Preservation Foundation decided to join forces to work on common issues. We used the SCAPE Catalogue...

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