In mid-July 2020, The Dutch Digital Heritage Network (DDHN) and the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) announced that they are working together to develop a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) with preservation tools. Both the OPF community survey and a survey conducted by DDHN among Dutch heritage organizations identified a growing need among the international community to work with open source preservation tools.
This project aims to respond to this need by creating an easy-to-install virtual machine that runs some of the most popular open source preservation tools. Heritage organizations will be able to use the VRE to test preservation tools without having to install them. The current version of the virtual research environment includes Apache Tika, DROID, JHOVE, and veraPDF. The team is testing the first prototype and is looking forward to sharing more news after the Summer.
Anyone interested in testing the VRE or who have suggestions about tools to be included should contact Ania Molenda, project leader of Preservation Tools at DDHN, at mail@janiamolenda.com.