Hoppla is a prototype archiving toolkit, with in-built digital preservation capacity; it’s not yet available to test, but it sounds very promising. It’s being designed specifically for home and small office users by developers at the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems at Vienna University of Technology. It supports preservation at the bit-stream level and includes functions for managing format obsolescence through migration pathways (don’t know which objects/pathways). The system also records metadata about preservation actions and object characteristics. If this is reliable, unobtrusive and low maintenance, perhaps we could roll it out to some of the creators the Library works with. It’s possible that the acquisition modules could be useful to accessioning archivists too.

-Susan Thomas