With a vision of ‘open sustainable digital preservation’, the Open Preservation Foundation is a member-driven, global organisation leading a collaborative effort to create, maintain and develop the reference set of sustainable, open source digital preservation tools.
Strategic areas of focus for the organisation
- Knowledge sharing – through a programme of webinars; member-led interest groups; community blog; toolset; and a wiki
- Community engagement - engaging with a community of developers and users from OPF members to individuals and organisations beyond the membership
- Training - maximising the numbers of users of the OPF toolset; maximising each tool’s effectiveness; offering a range of training formats
About the OPF toolset features
- small, modular elements
- open standards or specifications
- authoritative in interpretation and enforcement of standards
- open source to allow universal scrutiny and use
- identified and secured by a digital signature (platform applicable)
- production system quality (subject to implementation)
- can be used alone or integrated in third-party systems
- include test data that can be used to check third party tool compliance
Strategic goals
- More members across more domains
- Improve member benefits
- Support best practice
- Open source project guidance
- Host central community services
- Initial toolset composition
- Roadmaps
- Develop the adoption process
- Membership approval of a toolset composition
Action plans
- Resource and project planning - establish a resource and project planning process to balance the demands on staff, resources and time
- Management and reporting - establish appropriate management and reporting processes to ensure that staff, board and members are fully informed
- Establish a marketing plan and review process - create and maintain a yearly plan to outline marketing activities and reporting
- New member recruitment - OPF will create and maintain a member recruitment pack and devise a process to bring in new members
- Member survey - OPF will perform a regular survey of members. Survey information will feed into best practice projects, roadmaps and toolset composition
- Training - build re-usable training courses on components of the OPF reference toolset
- Policy - determine/ adopt a mechanism for cataloguing, documenting and explaining digital preservation policy
- Blogs, websites, branding – including updating the website to make information more findable
- OPF software maturity model - building on existing OPF work, establish a set of metrics for software quality and project quality
- Roadmap process - OPF will build a set of simple product roadmaps with the idea of improving the roadmap format and presentation through an iterative process.
You can find out more about the OPF here.