News

The National Archives UK and the British Library have partnered for the second workshop of the AURA research network, which is funded by AHRC and the Irish Research Council (You can read about the first workshop of the network here). The workshop will be held virtually.

This workshop will explore the current challenges and prospects of digital and born-digital archives, focusing on access, ethics, emerging formats and AI by bringing together experts from a range of disciplines, including archival science, data and computer science and the humanities, with experts and practitioners from cultural heritage institutions. On Day 1, the workshop aims to discuss issues of access both from infrastructural and user’s perspectives. It will also explore the ethical implications of the use of AI and advanced computational approaches to archival practices and archival research. On Day 2, the workshop will explore the challenges of access to email archives and collaborative initiatives to overcome these challenges, as well as both infrastructural and cultural issues relating to web archives and interactive websites.

In light of the global pandemic and, to allow time for proposals to plan for and incorporate options for hybrid or online conferencing, the iPres Steering Committee has taken the decision to extend the deadline for iPres host applications until June 2021.

For those working on a proposal for the upcoming 10th December deadline, we appreciate your patience as we all navigate these unprecedented times. Deferring the submission deadline will provide an opportunity to consider how proposals might creatively address the constraints and benefits of working and convening virtually.

Virtual Research Environment 1.0 released

The Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for preservation tools is now available to download. Developed by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network and the Open Preservation Foundation, the VRE is a “plug & play” virtual machine with a selection of open source digital preservation tools pre-installed.

VRE aims to lower barriers to using and testing digital preservation software. It enables users to try out tools typically used in the pre-ingest and ingest stages of a digital preservation workflow, without having to install or configure the software. The VRE currently contains six tools: Apache Tika, Droid, JHOVE, VeraPDF, MediaInfo and ffmpeg/Handbrake.

Arkivum, LIBNOVA, and T-Systems are the leaders of the three projects selected via the ARCHIVER Pre-commercial Procurement Tender to build prototypes for hybrid cloud end-to-end archival and preservation services for European Research communities.

Started in January 2019, the ARCHIVER project is one of the Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) initiatives funded by the H2020 programme of the European Commission. With a procurement budget of €3.4 million, ARCHIVER will procure innovative, cost-effective R&D solutions, supporting the IT requirements of European research infrastructures that handle data in the petabyte range and with high, sustained ingest rates, in the context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The second phase of the PCP will officially start on the 7th of December, with the announcement of the three consortia that will enter the prototype phase, led by the high-profile IT companies Arkivum, LIBNOVA, and T-Systems.

Currently, many research projects in the EOSC context cannot enable sustainable use of data beyond the life span of individual data infrastructures, as the archiving and preservation services are inadequate and fall below expectations while data stewardship costs are frequently underestimated during the planning phase. Using the PCP instrument and building on results of recent projects, ARCHIVER’s goal is to fulfil these promises in a multi-disciplinary environment, leveraging best practices, standards and economies of scale.

Following the closure of the ARCHIVER Tender, on the 8th of June 2020 five bids had been selected as a result of the ARCHIVER Pre-Commercial Procurement Request for Tenders for the provision of R&D for hybrid end-to-end archival and preservation services meeting the innovation challenges of the European Research communities, in the context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). During the following months, these five consortia have been working to provide a written detailed report including the architecture and technical design of the components of their solutions. 

Three of them will be selected to move to the second phase, the Prototype implementation phase, to build prototypes of their solutions including all components, and basic functionality, interoperability, and security tests will be performed by IT specialists from the buyers’ group.