– The source code of landmark software developed since the beginning of the computer era is a precious part of our cultural heritage, and needs to be properly rescued, curated, archived and made available to present and future generations. In this article, we present the Software Heritage Acquisition Process, that has been designed to provide detailed guidelines on how to perform this important task, preserving important historical information. This process has been validated extensively on several important pieces of software source code of historical relevance in the University of Pisa, in collaboration with UNESCO, and is open to all for adoption and improve-ment.
Extended abstract for poster proposal – In this extended abstract, the Open Preservation Foundation’s Archives Interest Group reports on our ongoing investigation of significant properties of spreadsheets. Using the InSPECT methodology for investigating significant properties of electronic content, our goal is to get hands-on experience in investigating the significant properties of deposited spreadsheets by adding a Spreadsheet Testing Report to the InSPECT Testing Reports lore. An additional result of the AIG investigation is a Spreadsheet Complexity Analyser tool that extracts spread-sheet-specific properties and can be used to calculate the complexity of a spreadsheet based on the values of those properties.
– Since 1996, the Internet Archive (IA) has provided storage, preservation, and access infrastructure and services to over 1,000 cultural heritage organizations around the world. It has also provided customized digital preservation services on a contractual basis to a handful of large institutions. In 2020, IA began building a more generalized digital preservation service in response to the needs of a broader range of institutions and to leverage IA’s self-owned data centers, non-profit cloud services, and demonstrated expertise in both small and petabyte-scale digital stewardship. This system is being developed in direct dialogue with 30+ organizations, including universities, public libraries, arts organizations, and cultural heritage organizations, over the course of the 2021 - 2022 year. This paper shares key takeaways from the information collected from this pre-pilot phase and serves as a lean landscape review of the current gaps within the digital preservation landscape, particularly as they relate to the distinct needs and goals of nonprofits, libraries, and cultural heritage organizations, that this service aims to address.
The Dutch Digital Heritage Network has developed an online tool that helps archives and heritage organisations to formulate their policy on file formats. It builds a knowledge base, via a smart combination of codification of formats on one hand and personalisation of tailor made policies on the other. This paper will explain how theonline tool is set up,what technologies it uses and what possible next steps might be in the near future.
