DPE, Planets and CASPAR Third Annual Conference: Costs, Benefits and Motivations for Digital Preservation

Sergio Albani

Sergio Albani, born in 1977 in the Netherlands but of Italian nationality, is a Physicist (Astrophysics and Space Physics branch) with several years of experience in the space field and particularly in Earth Observation.
He was awarded a Master in "Journalism and Scientific & Institutional Communication" by the University of Ferrara (Italy) in 2005.
After 4 years of work in industry as Software Engineer for the processing of EO satellite data, since 2 years he is employed at the European Space Agency (EO Applications Strategy Office, ESRIN establishment) to manage the CASPAR project and to contribute to other ESA initiatives in the area of Long Term Preservation of EO data.

Brian Aitken

Brian Aitken joined the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow in 2001 as a Systems Developer. He has worked both as sole developer and as leader of a development team on a wide range of successful projects, most recently Planets, for which he is leading the development of the Testbed, and Shaman, for which he is undertaking requirements definition. Previously he has managed and developed the websites for the Digital Curation Centre, DigitalPreservationEurope, Planets and DigiCULT. He has also developed content management systems and websites for several successful digitisation projects, including TheGlasgowStory, The University of Glasgow Story, a major digitisation of 16th century French emblem books and several History of Art websites.

Jerome Barthelemy

After musical studies in Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, Jerome Barthelemy acquired competencies in multimedia software development during more than twenty years of professional experience. From the development of an authoring system in 1986 to project management in the area of Information and Communication Technologies, conducted today in a world class research institute, Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique Musique, his activity has always been dedicated to the use of information and multimedia technologies for knowledge transfer and preservation.

Clive Billenness

Clive has worked for the British Library as a Project Consultant since October 2006. In this role he has provided project management support, advice and assurance to a number of BL projects, including some work on Planets.

Clive has spent over 20 years in IT and Datacommunications Management and Project Management, working on a variety of IT systems, often with the UK Emergency Services although he also spent 2 years working on multinational NATO aviation projects.

In 1998 Clive joined the Audit Commission (the body responsible for the audit of all local councils, health organisations, fire, ambulance and police forces in England) as a Senior Specialist Auditor. His main role was to provide intervention and support to projects in client organisations which were encountering difficulties. He also acted as a project manager for the Audit Commission itself.

In 2004, Clive went to work for KPMG as a Senior Manager for the Public Sector Information Risk Management Department for the North of England, as well as directing work on behalf of the UK National Audit Office.

Clive is a Certified Information Systems Auditor and also holds qualifications in Project Management and the Management of Risk. He is a member of the UK Office of Government Commerce's Examination Board for project management qualifications and regularly speaks at conferences and writes articles on Best Practice in Project and Risk Management.

Luigi Briguglio

Institution: Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A.

Role: Project Manager

Interest Areas:

• Service Oriented Architecture
• Component Based Software Engineering
• Web
• Automation and Electronics
• Emerging Technologies
• Architecture Analysis
• Development and Integration

Biography:

born in 1969, he received a degree in Electronic Engineering at University of Padua in 1996. In 2001 he joined Engineering, and actually he is a Project Manager Junior at the Engineering R&D Laboratory. He is involved as Technical Director in IST European R&D Projects and provides his experience in software architecture development process. He is tutor of degree thesis and stage too.

Currently he leads the work on the overall architecture in the CASPAR Project, which aims to research, develop and integrate advanced components to be used in a wide range of preservation activities.

Past experiences: INFM (National Institute for the Physics of Matter) for design and realisation of a SNOM microscope controller. Long experience in industrial system automation, specially in distributed control systems and supervision software.

Esther Conway

Esther originally trained in Physics at Imperial College London after which she worked as a professional librarian specializing in scientific information, during which time she took a Masters in Information Systems and Technology at City University. Esther has also worked for several years in the area of commercial publishing as a Solutions Consultant for Thomson Learning. In her most recent position she works as a technical analyst based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Luigi Fusco

Working in ESA since 1974, Luigi Fusco has more than 30 years experience in the Earth Observation (EO) system and application domain. He has continued to be involved in the planning and management of projects dealing with different aspects of EO payload data systems, EO applications and related innovation technologies. For the last few years, he has been leading the ESA participation in the development and utilisation of GRID, Open GIS, emerging Web-based and e-collaboration technologies for EO and environmental applications throughout ESA and EC-funded projects.

In the ESA participation to EC FP7 activities, he is the coordinator of the GRID-based Research Infrastructure Project GENESI-DR (Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations - Digital Repositories) and he leads the ESA participation in the following projects:

• Grid support action for Earth Science - DEGREE
• Digital Libraries in GRID environment - D4SCIENCE
• Testbed for Long Term Digital Data and Knowledge Preservation - CASPAR
• Collaborative Working Environment - Collaboration@Rural

He has published many papers in various international journals and conferences. He participates in the evaluation and review of EC-funded projects in the space and environment domains.

He was nominated as Senior Advisor in ESA in 2000.

David Giaretta

Dr Giaretta has had extensive experience in planning, developing and running scientific archives and providing and managing a variety of services to large numbers of users. In 2003 he was awarded an MBE for services to Space Science. As chair of CCSDS Panel 2 he made fundamental contributions to the OAIS Reference Model (ISO 14721) which is 'now adopted as the "de facto" standard for building digital archives' according to the NSF report: Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery, and continues to contribute to developing the follow on standards. He leads the work which aims at producing an ISO standard for audit and certification of digital repositories, following on from the work of the RLG/OCLC/NARA working group of which he was a member.

He co-organised a workshop entitled "Digital Curation: digital archives, libraries, and e-science" in 2001, bringing together, in many cases for the first time, a variety of communities with this common interest. In addition he co-edited the report of the Warwick workshop in 2005 entitled "Digital Curation and Preservation: Defining the research agenda for the next decade" which has proved to be very influential in the UK and internationally. He is now Associate Director for Development in the DCC and have played an active role in all aspects of the project; he also leads the CASPAR project which seeks to address fundamental issues of digital preservation. Groundbreaking work is being undertaken in the preservation of digitally encoded information in the science (STFC and ESA), cultural heritage (UNESCO) and contemporary performing arts (IRCAM and others). In addition he leads the PARSE.Insight EU project, which started in March 2008 with total spend 2.5 M€ and which will help to define the EU research infrastructure supporting digital preservation. PARSE.Insight is closely associated with the Alliance for Permanent Access to the Records of Science, which brings together major stakeholders across Europe.

Matthias Hemmje

Matthias Hemmje is full professor at FernUniversität in Hagen (FUH) since 2004 holding a chair for multimedia and internet applications. His primary research interests include information retrieval, multimedia databases, virtual environments, information visualization, visual interaction, and multimedia. Before joining the university, he was responsible for the acquisition and management of research projects in GMD-IPSI's research division (OASYS), division manager of the DELITE - Virtual Information and Knowledge Environments research division at Fraunhofer IPSI, full Professor for Computer Science, Chair for Media Informatics, at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, and full Professor for Computer Science, Chair for Media Technology, at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science.

Mario Hernandez

Currently working at the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) coordinating space partnerships to support the conservation, documentation and visualization of World Heritage sites.
While the World Heritage Convention aims to preserve natural and cultural sites form our earth of outstanding universal value, there are few activities concerned with the preservation of all the associated data. Mario Hernandez is currently deeply involved in an EC sponsored project (nickname CASPAR) that deals with the preservation of Artistic and Cultural heritage data.
Mr. Hernandez worked before at the United Nations Environment Porgramme (UNEP) assisting developing countries in elaborating their associated 'state of the environment reporting' using satellite iages, geographical information layers, images and text (another challenge for data preservation).
Previous to the UN Mr. Hernandez was ai the IBM Research Centres in Mexico and Paris developing new software for satellite image processing and geographical information systems.

Hans Hofman

Hans Hofman is senior advisor on digital longevity at the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands. He represents the Nationaal Archief in the PLANETS research project and the Digital Preservation Europe coordination action. Since 2000, he has represented the Netherlands in ISO TC46/SC11 on Records Management and is chair of the Working Group on RM metadata. Hans has acted as co-director of ERPANET (2001-2004) and was co-investigator in the InterPares project (1999-2006). Hans has given numerous presentations and written many articles on topics like digital preservation, recordkeeping metadata and electronic records management.

Ross King

Ross King has worked for more than five years at the Austrian Research Centers GmbH, which he joined in 2002 to help found the successful "Digital Memory Engineering" department. After moving to Vienna in 1995, he first worked as a post-doc at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, then moved to industry as an IT manager. Ross received his PhD in Physics from Stanford University, where his work concentrated on real-time data acquisition and analysis of large data samples in experimental particle physics. His present research interests include semantic multimedia information management and collaborative semantic annotation. Ross is a former member of the Board of Directors of the FP6 IP BRICKS and is a member of the Scientific Board of FP6 Planets and the leader of its Interoperability Framework Sub-project.

Salvatore Mele

Dr. Salvatore Mele holds a PhD in Physics and works at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. As of late 2006 he serves as project leader for the newly-created CERN Open Access Section. In this capacity he initiated recent discussions on issues in preservation, re-use and open access of high-energy physics data, partly financed by the European Commission through the PARSE.Insight project, in synergy with the Alliance for Permanent Access.

His main activity is as interim project manager for the international SCOAP3 consortium, aiming to convert to Open Access the entire High-Energy Physics literature, which counts about 50 partners in about 20 countries. He also co-ordinates a project on Open Access Publishing financed by the European Commission (SOAP). In addition, he is also active in repositories, managing the CERN institutional repository and contributing to architecting INSPIRE, the future information system for High-Energy Physics, jointly realised by leading laboratories in Europe and the United States.

Before his most recent appointment he worked for 15 years at the CERN LEP accelerator, the precursor of the LHC, where he led teams that measured fundamental physics constants, hunted for the Higgs boson and searched for hints of extra dimensions.

Dale Peters

Dale Peters is Scientific Technical Manager of the DRIVER project, (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research , and is based at the State and University Library of Göttingen. She is directly responsible for the collaboration between DRIVER partners, and with DRIVER-related projects. She is currently engaged in the development of a DRIVER Confederation to extend this vision to a world-wide network of scientific content repositories, offering a robust infrastructure supporting scholarly communications of the future.

Previously Dale Peters provided leadership to DISA: Digital Innovation South Africa, in the collaborative development of digital library services across multiple remote institutions through a central digital library infrastructure. With a personal research interest in digital curation in developing countries, she has acted as a consultant for UNESCO, the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), and the World Digital Library; participating in international initiatives aimed at the development of digital repositories in support of global paradigms of electronic scholarship.

Stephen Rankin

Stephen Rankin has been working in the area of scientific software development and digital preservation for a number of years and currently works on the DCC and CASPAR projects as a data research scientist and software developer. His particular interests include the long-term archiving and reuse of scientific data. Prior to this Stephen studied for a Ph.D. in Physics at Manchester University (UK).

Colin Rosenthal

Colin Rosenthal is an IT-Developer at The State and University Library, Aarhus, Denmark where he has been involved in developing a number of major digital repository projects including the Danish national internet archive, the Danish Radio & TV Archive and an archive of material harvested from Danish Institutional Repositories. Dr. Rosenthal is responsible for the co-ordination of The State and University Library's contribution to DPE and is co-ordinator for DPE's workpackage on Digital Repositories.

Seamus Ross

Seamus Ross is Professor of Humanities Informatics and Digital Curation and Founding Director of HATII (Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute) at the University of Glasgow. He is an Associate Director of the Digital Curation Centre in the UK, a co-principal investigator in the DELOS Digital Libraries Network of Excellence, and Principal Director of DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE). He was Principal Director of ERPANET, a European Commission activity to enhance the preservation of cultural heritage and scientific digital objects, and a key player in The Digital Culture Forum (DigiCULT Forum) which worked to improve the take-up of cutting edge research and technology by the cultural heritage sector. Before joining the University of Glasgow he was Head of ICT at the British Academy and a technologist at a company specialising in knowledge engineering. He earned a doctorate from the University of Oxford. Some of his publications are available at http://eprints.erpanet.org. During 2005/6 Seamus Ross was Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.

Dirk von Suchodoletz

Dirk works as an assistant at the professorship of communication systems of the institute for computer science at Freiburg University. He studied math, economics and politics at the Georg August University of Goettingen and received a diploma on Mathematics in 2002. His first contact with computers was a ZX Spectrum (Z80 based home computer) machine in 1986. He bought his first PC, an AMD 386, in 1991 and has used VMware and similar tools since the turn of the century. Thus he was fascinated to travel back in computer history using emulators and X86 virtualization tools. In 2003, with his colleague Randolph Welte, he started a PhD thesis on longterm preservation of dynamic digital objects which was finished in July 2008 and it was through this research he became involved in the PLANETS project and the same year the research group joined the Nestor initiative on long term preservation in Germany in 2006.

Manfred Thaller

Manfred Thaller is Professor of Humanities Computer Science at the University of Cologne. He graduated in 1975 with a PhD in Modern History from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. In 1978, Manfred took up the post of research and then senior research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut for History in Goettingen, where he specialised in the field of IT applications in history. He subsequently developed this into the concept of a Humanities computer science, for which he received his professorship at the University of Cologne. Since 1995, Manfred has been part-time professor in Historical Computer Science at the University of Bergen, where he became, in 1997, founding director of the Humanities Information Technology Research Programme and research centre, and then, in 1999, permanent director and professor at the arts faculty. Since 2001, Manfred has been involved in projects in mass digitisation of cultural heritage material resulting in an interest in its survival and additional research focus in the field of long-term preservation. This has increasingly brought him into contact with the library community. Since 2001, he has been a serving member of the German National Research Council's Library Committee.

Ian Upshall

Ian Upshall is the 'Information & Data Recording Manager' at the Harwell office of the UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the organisation responsible for managing the decommissioning of many of the civil nuclear liabilities and the delivery of the deep geological waste disposal facility.

The NDA was formed by the Government in 2005 and the facilities for which it has responsibility include those manufacturing fuel assemblies, Nuclear Power Plants (operational and shut-down), fuel reprocessing, laboratories and waste interim storage and disposal. The NDA is thus responsible for maintaining records, information and knowledge relating to a wide range of nuclear experience and technologies, spanning almost 60 years.

Whilst working for UK Nirex Ltd (the organisation responsible for radioactive waste management and development of the disposal facility before the creation of the NDA), Ian oversaw a series of projects that examined the challenge of preserving information over very long periods. The creation and subsequent management of radioactive waste (including its preparation for disposal) necessarily creates large quantities of data and information - much of which is in a range of digital formats. It was recognised that a large proportion of these data would have to remain accessible for many decades and, quite possibly, centuries.