Blogs

In a previous blog post I showed how we resurrected NL-menu, the first Dutch web index. It explains how we recovered the site’s data from an old CD-ROM, and how we subsequently created a local copy of the site by serving the CD-ROM’s contents on the Apache web server. This follow-up post covers the final […]

At our Annual General Meeting in May, Remco van Veenendaal from the National Archives of the Netherlands was elected to join the OPF’s board of directors. I caught up with Remco to find out more about his digital preservation work. Tell us a bit about yourself and your role As digital preservation officer of the National […]

NL-menu was the first Dutch web index. The site was originally founded by a consortium of SURFnet, Dutch universities and the KB. From the mid-nineties onwards it was maintained solely by the KB. NL-menu was discontinued in 2004, after which the site was taken offline. In 2006 the domain name was sold to a private […]

Kees Teszelszky, curator digital collections Koninklijke Bibliotheek – National Library of The Netherlands   The Web Curator Tool (WCT) is a workflow management application designed for selective web archiving. It was created for use in libraries and other digital heritage collecting organisations, and supports collection by non-technical users while still allowing complete control of the […]

On March 15, 2018, the second playtest of Preservia took place. Preservia is a new board game about digital preservation. Voorburg Half past five. Together with my colleague Pepijn Lucker, I travel from the National Archives of the Netherlands to Voorburg. Marcel Ras (Digital Heritage Network) lives there and kindly offered to be our host. […]

Motivation When it comes to PDF validation, the world is suddenly very small. Although many digital archives have to deal with PDF (rather than PDF/A, at least not from the start), there is only one PDF-validator that I know of and that’s JHOVE. Having worked with JHOVE for six years now, I feel I know […]

On 28 November 2017, the first group of students completed the basic course ‘Learning Digital Preservation’ (Leren Preserveren in Dutch). The thirteen students, working at archives, museums and a ministry, rated the course of the Digital Heritage Network, Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI) and the Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation with an 8 (7.96 out of […]

Archiving and Digital Preservation require international cooperation. For that reason, but also because we are preparing an application for the Data Seal of Approval (now Core Trust Seal), the National Archives of the Netherlands (NANETH) had several documents translated. Information about NANETH previously only available in Dutch is now also available in English. The English version is a translation […]

Motivation As most of us rely on JHOVE for file format validation, it is important to gain information about the quality of JHOVE’s validation skills – and, if inadequacies are detected, improve JHOVE. This can be done by tool benchmarking, as I already did with JPEG in 2016 and with TIFF earlier this year and […]

No time to wait – Conference on Open Source Software in (Digital) Archives On 9 / 10 November I was able to attend the “No Time to Wait 2”, a conference on open source software in (film) archives held at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna. In contrast to the first “No Time to Wait” […]