CHAPEL HILL - The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) has welcomed two new affiliate organizations to its membership: Portico, a digital preservation service, and the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a number one ranked school in the United States.

The OPF addresses core digital preservation challenges by engaging with its members and the community to support the development of practical and sustainable tools and services to ensure long-term access to digital content. Its mission is to ensure that its members around the world are able to meet their digital preservation challenges with a solution that is widely adopted and actively being practiced by national heritage organizations and beyond. The international foundation includes members from around the world and hosts a variety of conferences and events including webinars and hackathons.

“We are delighted these organizations have decided to join us,” said Bram van der Werf, executive director of OPF. “Both organizations have a significant impact on the digital preservation practice on a global scale. The UNC brings expertise in research and education, and Portico for digital preservation services. As members of OPF, UNC and Portico will both play a major role in the further development of tools which are relevant for the OPF community.”

Both Portico and SILS are enthusiastic to be a part of OPF.

"Portico values OPF’s focus on practical solutions and its emphasis on a broad-based and active community of practise. We share OPF's belief that the digital preservation community as a whole benefits from the wide-spread sharing of experience, tools, and techniques” said Kate Wittenberg, managing director of Portico.

“I am very excited that SILS is joining the OPF and will be helping to extend the reach of the very successful OPF model and community into the US,” said Christopher (Cal) Lee, associate professor at SILS.

SILS is the first iSchool to join the OPF, and Portico the first digital preservation service organization. The OPF now has three member organizations from the U.S.

The current list of members may be viewed at: http://openplanetsfoundation.org/members.

For more information about UNC SILS visit: http://sils.unc.edu/.

For more information about Portico visit: http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/.

 

 

Wanda Monroe

Director of Communications

School of Information and Library Science

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

108 Manning Hall, CB#3360

Chapel Hill, NC  27599-3360

919.843.8337

sils.unc.edu

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