On Thursday 28 May we welcomed our members to the fifth Annual General Meeting of the OPF, kindly hosted by the Austrian Institute of Technology in Vienna.

The meeting was well-attended, and we also had a live link for those who could not attend in person.This year we ran a parallel technical track for the first time, inviting developers and researchers take a closer look at some of our recent technical activities and for members to share their work and priorities to shape our plans for the coming year.

We began with an overview of our activities from the past year. Highlights included:

• Welcoming new member, National Library of Latvia;
• Completing the SCAPE project;
• Winning PREFORMA funding for veraPDF phase 1 (design) and phase 2 (prototyping);
• Developing and publishing our Strategic Plan 2015-18
• Launching our new name, brand and website;
• Undertaking our member survey and consulting with members to develop our Annual Plan.

Ed mapped our activities from the past 12 months against each of the points under our strategic themes. We asked members to complete an evaluation form, rating how well we have achieved these strategic goals.

The official business of the meeting then got under way. We presented our annual accounts, and were delighted to welcome Stéphane Reecht, Bibliothèque nationale de France; Barbara Sierman, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, and John Kay, Jisc, to the OPF Board of Directors. Neil Grindley, Jisc, and Hildelies Balk, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, retired from the Board in March and May 2015 respectively. Our affiliate members then each gave a presentation about their in-kind contribution to OPF activities.

After lunch we divided our members into groups to review our planned activities from the past 12 months, and give feedback as to what has been useful and what can be improved. Members were asked to identify priorities under each of our strategic themes to steer our future planning.

This was followed by a round-table discussion about preservation watch and technical registries, which were both discussed at last year’s AGM. Members gave feedback on their interest in these topics and discussed other initiatives that are being carried out in the community.

Finally the technical track participants summarised their activities. Following a round table “show and tell” the planning session focussed on collaborating to carry out assessments of digital preservation tools. This will be explored over the summer and autumn using format identification tools as a test case. These were chosen as the group can build on existing work and the tools have limited functionality making them easier to test.

The slides from the day are available to members here. Recordings from the day will be made available in due course.