The Open Preservation Foundation’s (OPF) Archives Interest Group (AIG) has released a report documenting their research on the significant properties of spreadsheets and the impact this has for long term preservation.

Founded in 2016, the AIG is an OPF member group bringing together participants from the Danish National Archives, the Estonian National Archives, the National Archives of the Netherlands, and Preservica. The group, which is open to all OPF members, meets regularly and works collaboratively to address practical challenges that organisations face in their day-to-day digital preservation practice.

The AIG identified spreadsheet preservation as one of their top priorities when the group was formed, with the aspiration to answer questions such as ‘should we migrate?’ and ‘how do we measure the success or quality of the migration?’.

Chair of the OPF AIG, Remco van Veenendaal, said:

On behalf of the Archives Interest Group, I am very happy to share the results of our work with the community, and we welcome feedback on the report. The practical nature of this work has helped improve our understanding of spreadsheet formats and has led to changes in our approach to handling spreadsheets within our institutions.”

Following a poster presentation of the work-in-progress at iPRES 2019, which won ‘best poster’, the AIG will present a summary of the investigation at iPRES 2021 on 20 October at 18:00 – 19:30 Asia/Pacific UTC+8 | 11:00 – 12:30 Europe/Africa UTC+1 | 05:00 – 06:30 N/S Americas UTC-5.

The final report ‘The Significant Properties of Spreadsheets’ is available on Zenodo.