Who are you?

My name is Barbara Sierman and I work in the Research department of the KB National Library of the Netherlands as an advisor in the area of digital preservation. 

One of my main responsibilities is making sure that digital preservation is embedded in our organisation.

What is your role in SCAPE?

Apart from leading the work on policy representation and best practice guidelines and recommendations I chair the SCAPE Usergroup. This group consists of six content holders in SCAPE (The British Library, Internet Memory Foundation, KB National Library of the Netherlands, the Austrian National Library, STFC and the Danish State and University Library) who function as ‘SCAPE ambassadors’, helping to further the implementation of SCAPE outcomes in their organisations. They also influence the development work, similar to the forum of users that proved to be successful during the PLANETS project.

Why is your organisation involved in SCAPE?

As the National Library of the Netherlands, the KB of course stores a large quantity of digital material – the image below shows the size of our digital collections in July 2012. We need large-scale solutions for everything we want to do with this material, such as checking file formats. In addition, we want to contribute to the development of tools & services for digital preservation, and it is also of interest to us how policies in this area can be implemented. 

Digital storage size of KB collection – July 2012 (467 Tb total)
 

What are the biggest challenges in SCAPE as you see it?

I think the biggest challenge in SCAPE is to link the practical needs of digital preservations practitioners to the technical solutions that are being developed. This is something we continually monitor, review and encourage within the Usergroup.

What do you think will be the most valuable outcome of SCAPE?

I think SCAPE will be useful for everyone dealing with digital preservation, because digital collections are growing so fast nowadays that they will all become large-scale collections. Therefore, the more automation SCAPE can introduce to digital preservation the better, both for efficiency and for reducing costs. Also, the solutions that SCAPE develops will be applicable to various content streams (web content, digital repositories and research data), which is useful since most institutions have a mix of material that they want to preserve.

Contact information

Barbara Sierman
KB National Library of theNetherlands
[email protected]