The National Archives is proposing to launch a new phase of development of its DROID tool, and is seeking to engage with various user groups and stakeholders from the digital preservation community, government and the wider archives sector communities to help inform and discuss potential developments and user needs. As part of this process, The National Archives, in conjunction with the Digital Preservation Coalition, invites interested parties to attend a one day workshop, hosted at Kew, to discuss their experiences of using DROID and PRONOM in their respective disciplines, discuss how the tools fit their use case, and describe both positive and negative experiences of the tools and their interaction with The National Archives.
There will be a mixture of invited talks and extensive open discussions; the invited talks may focus on experiences, ideas to augment or improve either service, and may encompass wider ideas and thoughts on file identification in general. The day will commence with a short introduction by Tim Gollins, Head of Digital Preservation at The National Archives, who will set out the case for PRONOM and DROID at The National Archives, and describe the business requirements which have helped shape and drive the tools development to this point. Throughout the day, via twitter and less technology dependent mechanisms, we will seek to gather a list of hot topics and discussion points from the community, which will then be used as the basis for an end of day discussion which will help inform the development of the next iteration of DROID, set to commence in 2012. The result of the day will provide The National Archives with content to begin a broader open consultation between December and January which will see active participants in the DROID community submit requirements for the tool and vote on and discuss existing requirements. The National Archives will use this whole process to help prioritise community requests, alongside its own internal requirements, when work on DROID 7.0 begins.
Programme of Presentations:
- Ross Spencer: Linked Data PRONOM
- Dr David Tarrant (University of Southampton) - UHT Digital Preservation: Increasing the Shelf Life of our Data, Services and Tools
- Bill Roberts (Open Planets Foundation (OPF), The Nationaal Archief (National Archives of the Netherlands)) – ‘Towards a format registry ecosystem’
- Andy Jackson: Linked People
- Kate Pritchard, Mike Kaye (DEFRA – Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) - ‘DEFRA experiences using DROID and using an IT provider’
- Jenny Mitcham (Archaeology Data Service) - ‘Using DROID to create file level metadata – a case study from the Archaeology Data Service’
- Johan van der Knijff (SCAPE Project / Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands) – ‘Evaluation of format identification tools’