News

Updates to the website and wiki

There have been some excellent discussions on the OPF blogs about a range of issues, and we would like to thank those of you who have contributed to that. This has illustrated the incredible amount of knowledge in the community about the digital preservation challenges we face, and also about potential solutions.

Collaboration & Consolidation

A new direction in file characterisation

While thinking about the Dev8D challenge (which I cannot compete in :( I got to thinking about the way we do file characterisation.

I am not old enough to know the history of this field, but it seems that the grand old tool is the file(8) tool from unix. When "file" was developed, all files should contain/contained a few magic bytes in the header, to help identification tools. We still see this pattern.

In the room

One of my favourite parts of the Planets project was the service developers' workshops. The events brought together the developers from across the project (and from outside too). In each and every one, it was always clear that the people in that room really cared about this stuff, and really wanted to push things forward together...

Higher Education sector given key role in securing the UK’s digital legacy

The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) are joining forces to encourage the UK’s leading Higher Education (HE) institutions to take up a central role in European wide efforts to preserve our digital heritage.

Europe lays Foundation for preserving digital heritage – www.openplanetsfoundation.org

  • Unlike parchment and paper, digital data has a life span of years not millennia 
  • 3 billion euros worth of vital data is already being lost every year in the EU alone
  • New international consortium known as the Open Planets Foundation (OPF) formed to tackle preservation challenge