DCH-RP (Digital Cultural Heritage – Roadmap for Preservation) and the partners of the Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry, i.e. The Digital Curation Centre (DCC), The Digital Curation Exchange (DCE), National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA), The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) and Preserving digital Objects With Restricted Resources project (POWRR) are investigating the possibility to join their efforts to set up a common registry of services and tools useful for preserving digital information for the long term.
The aim of this registry is to help decision makers selecting quality, mature, sustainable (maintained) and portable tools to be used to plan and implement their digital preservation strategy.
The idea that is currently under discussion is to merge and integrate the work that has been done to set up the DCH-RP registry in the Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry (COPTR), in order to collate the knowledge on preservation tools in one single place, thus providing a unique and sustainable reference point to the whole digital preservation community.
The DCH-RP registry of services and tools
The DCH-RP registry collects and describes information and knowledge related to tools, technologies and systems that can be applied for the purposes of digital cultural heritage preservation. It also reviews existing and emerging services developed and offered by R&D projects, public organisations and commercial solution vendors.
Whilst providing a broad overview of the existing solutions, the registry initiative focuses on analysing those services and tools that can enable cultural heritage institutions to benefit from the capacities of e-Infrastructures including cloud and grid systems.
Tools and services are categorized by purpose, technologies required, resource formats supported and domain-specific application, among many other criteria. Alongside this functional description, an attempt has been made (for a subset of the tools and services covered) to provide assessments of each. In the first iteration, assessment criteria chosen have been: popularity, support level, portability, scalability, licensing model, and modularity/openness of architecture.
Help us to select the most relevant and used services for digital preservation!
In order to improve the registry, we prepared a survey to rank the services that are listed.
The questionaire, which is anonymous, is intented to determine what services are especially interesting and used by the DCH community.
Please help us in identifying the most relevant services by filling in this survey!
The results will be taken up while working in the next iteration of DCH-RP registry and in the set up of the common registry of services and tools for digital preservation together with the partners of the Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry.
Claudio Prandoni and Paul Wheatley
This event, event organised by EAGLE, Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy e Wikimedia Italia with the support of Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Roma, aims to serve as a platform for sharing knowledge and good practices while stimulating reflections on the role of digital technologies in the preservation and promotion of cultural digital heritage.
On April 4th, 2014, 
After a welcome message from Erik Buelinckx (KIK-IRPA), the project Coordinator Börje Justrell (Riksarkivet) introduced the context and the objectives of the PREFORMA project and of the pre-commercial procurement. Then, Bert Lemmens (Packed) presented the challenge brief, giving an overview of the requirements and specifications of the tender. Antonella Fresa (Promoter), the PREFORMA Technical Coordinator, followed illustrating how to get information about the tender, how to participate to the call and which are the different phases of the procurement, from the publication of the call until the evaltuation of the proposals. After a short break, the last three presentations covered how the design phase will be organised (Peter Pharow, Fraunhofer), the mechanisms which will regulate the evaluation of the prototypes (Nicola Ferro, University of Padua) and the open source approach which stands at the basis of the PREFORMA project (Bjorn Lundell, University of Skövde).
The Q&A session which followed involved many of the attendees around a number of key topics, among which: the usage scenarios to be addressed by the suppliers; the data sets which will be made available by the memory institutions participatng to PREFORMA and those that have to be provided by the tenderers; ideas on sustainability and business models; the conformancy check of the metadata associated to the digital objects; the reporting and feedback process, including the relationship with the standardisation bodies; the possibility to include in the tender other formats or processes.
The User Forum will also be a platform to look at Horizon 2020 opportunities, in terms of outlining EUDAT’s plans for research data management planning support for projects, how collaboration with existing and new users will evolve as well as interacting with attendees on their expectations and requirements for services and support from EUDAT under Horizon2020.
OPENAIRE 
The project Cultural Heritage Counts for Europe will gather, analyze, consolidate and widely disseminate the existing data on the impact of cultural heritage – i.e. the impact on the social, economic, cultural as well as environmental. It will result in a European mapping of both qualitative and quantitative evidence-based research carried out at the European, national, regional, local and/or sectorial levels.
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