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Digital Preservation - The Planets Way

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Biographies

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.

Christoph Becker

Christoph Becker is PhD researcher at the Department of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology. Since 1998 he has worked as an independent IT consultant and software architect on a wider range of IT projects. Christoph graduated with an MSc in Economics and Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology in 2007 and with an MSc and BSc in Computer Science in 2006 and 2004 respectively. He has been involved in research projects and published research papers at international conferences relating to Digital Preservation. His special interest is Preservation Planning. Christoph is a member of Planets� Scientific Board and advisor to its Technical Coordination Committee.

Clive Billenness

Clive Billenness works for the British Library and is the Programme Manager for the Planets Project. A Certified Information Systems Auditor, he is also qualified in Project and Programme Management, and holds the UK Office of Government Commerce's accreditation as a Practitioner in the Management of Risk.

Clive is a member of the Office of Government Commerce�s Examination Board for Project, Programme and Risk Management qualifications and is also the Regional Chairman of the Chartered Institute for Public Finance and Accountancy�s Computer Audit sub-group. He is a regular contributor to the CIPFA magazine "The Account".

Sara van Bussel

After graduating in Cultural Heritage studies in 2008, Sara van Bussel started as a full time researcher for Planets at KB-NL. Among other, she is involved in the development of the preservation action Tool Registry (Pronom), the preservation planning model, the gap analysis in tool provision, Testbed and other work packages of Planets.

Vittore Casarosa

Awaiting Biography

Volker Heydegger

Volker Heydegger received a MA degree at the University of Cologne in applied computer science for the humanities (Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Informationsverarbeitung, HKI). Since 2004 he is a research associate at HKI, mainly involved in digital preservation projects, starting with DELOS, the long running EU-funded Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, where he has participated in the preservation cluster of the project. Since 2006 he is engaged in Planets with main focus on information abstraction and characterization.

Heydegger also works currently towards his PhD, which deals with the suitability of file formats for digital preservation, especially with regard to the aspect of data corruption.

Ross King

Ross King received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. After moving to Vienna in 1995, he migrated to the IT sector, and joined the Austrian Research Centers in 2002 to help found the Digital Memory Engineering group, which he presently leads. His research interests are primarily concerned with digital preservation and semantic multimedia information management. He has been active in a number of European projects, including TELplus, Planets, and EuropeanaConnect.

Hannes Kulovits

Hannes Kulovits is currently a PhD researcher at the Department of Software Technology and Interactive Systems at the Vienna University of Technology. He received his Master in Business Informatics from the Vienna University of Technology in 2005. He is actively involved in several research projects in the field of Digital Preservation where his main focus lies in Preservation Planning and Recommender Systems.

Jan Schnasse

Jan Schnasse is a scientific assistant at the Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Informationsverarbeitung (Humanities Computer Science ), University Cologne. He received his Magister Artium in 2006 and is currently working on a doctoral thesis about object based storage and long term preservation. In 2006 he joined the PLANETS project, researching file format chararcterisation and novel storage technologies.

Barbara Sierman

Barbara Sierman MA, studied Dutch literature of the Enlightenment at the University of Amsterdam. She then joined Pica (now OCLC) as a library consultant. She had various jobs at IT companies as a consultant, last at Cap Gemini. In 2005 she started at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library of The Netherlands) at the Digital Preservation Department and is now the Digital Preservation Manager. She is engaged in the EU projects PLANETS and DRIVER and participates in international working groups on digital preservation, like TRAC, GDFR and JHOVE2. She gave presentations on digital preservation, preservation metadata and organizing digital preservation and wrote several articles on these topics.

Petra Helwig

Petra Helwig worked for several years for the Dutch Ministry of the Interior where she specialised in software engineering and information management. She joined the Dutch National Archives in 2006 where she works as a Digital Longevity advisor.