Blogs

Technical provenance metadata is metadata that details technical changes that have been to a file during its life. Note that this does not detail changes made across versions of a file, but to the file itself. Within the National Library of New Zealand systems environment, we have no single natural home for technical provenance information […]

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are keen to engage with the digital preservation community for comment on their draft Web Publications standard (https://w3c.github.io/wpub/) – a possible parent specification for future EPUBs. They would like to ensure that this specification, and future Web Publications based on it, are well prepared for archival. This is an […]

The following is a guest post by the iPRES2018 Social Media Team. The interview was led by Michelle Lindlar with the Ad Hoc Programming Coordinators, Nancy McGovern and Maureen Pennock iPRES – the International Conference on Digital Preservation – is the premier and longest-running conference series on digital preservation. The 15th anniversary of the conference series […]

General thoughts on file format identification File format identification is a big and complex topic. And somehow emotional. Whenever and wherever I speak about File Format Identification, there is always some well-meaning person that says: “That’s not format identification. It will only be if you add validation.” Or, alternatively: “There is no such thing as […]

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 […]