Attendees at the first AQuA Project event in Leeds, UK, are spending 3 days tackling some preservation issues with their digital collections. We’re trying to answer questions such as:

• What does my digital collection consist of?
• What preservation risks does it face?
• Are any of the files broken?
• Are there any duplicates?

We’re mid way through the event where we’ve speed dated collection owners, techies and digital preservation experts to form preservation issue solving teams. Some interesting solutions are in development with topics such as image and audio fingerprinting for validation and de-duplication, PDF font validation and risk assessment, metadata/content/ocr consistency checking and automatic identification of damaged video files.

We’re also trying to capture and define the various collections, problems and solutions so that the work we begin here can be taken forward elsewhere. Our work in progress can be found here:

http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/AQuA/Collections%2C+Issues%2C+Contexts+and+Solutions

We’ll also be evaluating this approach to working and refining our programme for our next event in London on the 13th June (places are filling up fast, so book now!).