The OPF has been a part of the E-ARK Consortium since 2018, and OPF colleagues play a key role in the communications/outreach team (Julie Allen and Helena Watson) and the validation team (Carl Wilson and Darren Digham) in the eArchiving Initiative (https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/activities/earchiving).
And we have all been very busy in 2024 as it was the 10th Anniversary of the original E-ARK project back in 2014! So, we decided to go back to the Technical University in Lisbon, Portugal on 5th – 7th February 2024, exactly 10 years on from our original E-ARK launch there, to celebrate alongside developing our strategies and concrete plans. The Portuguese weather was kind to us, and our INESC-ID colleagues provided a wonderful anniversary cake!
We continued the 10th Anniversary theme with a day-long event in Brussels on 29th May 2024 to reflect on the past ten years and discuss the milestones and future directions of eArchiving https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/10th-anniversary-earchiving-commemorated-brussels. This was a really valuable event where we heard about many success stories and use cases, and also gathered valuable feedback from our user communities in a session compered by Julie.
An eArchiving team took part in the Digital Archiving Futures conference in Mikkeli Finland in September 2024 https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/earchiving-initiative-digital-archiving-futures-conference where we enjoyed beautiful weather and lovely scenery as well as a stimulating conference and an internal training meeting.
In November we participated in the DLM meetings in Budapest, and then held a day-long event on 7th November 2024 on AI and archiving together with the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security Services in Budapest https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/events/theory-meets-practice-harnessing-ai-practical-implementations-digital-archiving. On 8th November 2024 we trialled the first modules from our eArchiving curriculum at the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest. Its Digital Heritage Lab has recently begun a Master’s degree in ‘Data Stewardship’ and modules from the eArchiving Curriculum are being used to form the digital archiving elements of the course.
Last but not least a group of us attended Euromed 2024 to present our work done on 3D specifications for Cultural Heritage, and to explore how they can be used by various projects etc. in this domain.
Throughout the year we have been busy working on our specifications (a new version was published in May with a super new production pipeline developed by Carl), and our open-source tools (for example see our recently updated validator https://github.com/E-ARK-Software/eark-validator ). Our Conformance Seal is now in full operation (https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/activities/earchiving-conformance-seal ) so please feel free to apply if you are using E-ARK specifications in your archive or software solution. In terms of capacity building and training, our major highlights are the development of the eArchiving curriculum (https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/activities/earchiving-training ) plus the webinar series (https://www.youtube.com/@e-ark ) which included our first webinar in French on sustainability (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x9upEbhR8k ). We have been building synergies with Data Spaces and Building Blocks, and one particular focus was on developing a White paper https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/earchiving-white-paper-eidas2 on the eIDAS2 regulation (https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eidas-regulation ).
We are very lucky to have a really collaborative consortium and also a great team at DG CNECT.
We look forward to 2025!
