Ross Spencer

Senior Systems Architect working on the Orcfax and Arkly platforms.

• Development of Web3 “oracle” technology for the Cardano blockchain.
• Research into Arweave as a permanent decentralized storage solution.
• Identification of requirements and technology gaps.
• Development of interfaces and APIs supporting cross-process interactions across adecentralized network of autonomous oracle nodes performing data gathering, validation, and publication.
• Development and implementation of coding standards and continuous integration.
• Software and solutions development and maintenance.
• Liaison with staff, external contractors, and customers.

Development of a RO-CRATE extension and improved logging in the University’s “GOCFL” OCFL implementation.

• Development of RO-CRATE package and extension to support research data workflows.
• Collaboration with Univervisty of Basel colleagues to identify and document sources of errors in GOCFL and their triggers.
• Create test corpora to test GOCFL functionality and improve integration testing.
• Integrate, document, and improve, GOCFL’s error factory capabilities.
• Discover, logging, and implementation of fixes for issues discovered during the term of the contract.

Migration of open source code created in support of Rosetta based digital preservation functions from Python 2 to Python 3. Improve branding and usability of the Demystify collection profiling tool.

• Migrate custom Rosetta ingest functionality from Python 2 to 3.
• Demystify usability improvements including client-side allowlist and denylist functions.
• Analysis and design of Demystify’s client-side identification and reporting capability.
• Liaise with Richard Lehane to integrate Siegfreid WASM libraries into the Demystify front-end.

Senior Software Developer working on the Orcfax and Arkly platforms.

• Development of Web3 oracle technology for the Cardano blockchain.
• Development of metadata standards.
• Software development and maintenance.
• Building team capability and standards.

Conception of a strategy for digital long-term archiving and digital preservation “lore” at Ravensburger AG.

• Collaboration with the corporate archivist.
• Embedding of digital preservation within the company culture across international boundaries, and the Ravensburger Brands (Brio, Thinkfun, and subsidiaries).
• Outreach and embedding of digital preservation concepts across the organization.
• Development strategy and policy.
• Prototype replacement of the legacy archival catalog using Wikidata.
• Tender development for a long-term digital preservation solution.
• Collaborative proof of concept program for a long-term preservation system with LIBNOVA.

Consultancy role with the Digipres Collective for PARBICA (Pacific Bureau of the International Council on Archives (ICA)). Developing guidance for implementing Access to Memory (AtoM) in the Pacific.

A 350+ hour development project in collaboration with Yale University Library and Siegfried’s maintainer to integrate Wikidata sources into the format identification tool.

Working on the Archivematica and Access to Memory projects.

• Analysis and development of digital preservation solutions and workflows for local and international GLAM instuttions across the sector.
• Software analysis and requirements development.
• Translation of further requirements into code.
• Software development in Python, and Golang.
• Creation of test corpora to improve testing processes.
• Delivery of technical training at community training camps.
• Requirements analysis and development of solutions for organizations across the GLAM sector as wide and varied as local archives, social history archives, to national museums and institutions.

Part of the Digital Continuity and Systems Standards and Strategy team creating local and government policy. Supporting digital preservation decision-making; solutions development; and providing agency guidance.

• Policy development across New Zealand government.
• Development of digital preservation strategy, polocy, and procedure.
• Collaboration across teams to resolve complex technical issues.
• Outreach within the New Zealand digital preservation community.
• With colleagues, completed New Zealand Government’s first born-digital transfers and developed a methodology to enable future efforts.

The research and provision of solutions toward the goal of preserving government’s digital record.

• Primary lead for PRONOM updates and maintenance.
• Collaborate on PRONOM’s community contribution strategy.
• Research and comprehension of file format specifications.
• Translation of file format specifications into PRONOM signatures.
• Development of policy and procedures in support of government digital transfer.
• Participation and collaboration on international projects such as UDFR, and PLANETS.

Junior Analyst Programmer (C++) developing VOIP (Voice over IP) recording solutions; through translation of VoIP specifications or reverse engineering.