Open Planets Foundation

Last time, I discussed Pronom and Droid. We had a quick look at the compiled (nearly unreadable) pattern information that the Droid signature file holds and the uncompiled (but still hard to read) representation that is stored in Pronom.

Pronom and Droid, developed primarily at the National Archives (TNA) of the United Kingdom, have been a key contribution to the digital preservation community. Pronom is a registry of information about file formats. The TNA provides access to the Pronom registry on-line at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM and maintains the information. Droid is a software application that uses some of the file format information to identify the type of specific digital objects.

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.

Last Thursday (September 23) during Ipres, I attended the  workshop ‘Greater than the sums of our parts’, about collaboration.

Lively discussions about sharing information and how we can build a collaborating community. 

Coming soon…OPF Practitioners & Developers Hackathon,

The problem of preserving content in digital form has received widespread attention in the cultural heritage sector, and within the scientific research, higher education sector and beyond. Starting in the early 1990s within the digital library community it is now a recognized problem in business as well. For example personnel records and legal documents may need to be kept for 50 years despite the obsolescence of the computers and software systems that originally authored them.

Following three and a half very enjoyable years working on Planets, I’m now tasked with integrating some of the Planets software with the Digital Library System here at The British Library.

While some of the work I’ll be doing over the next few months will be quite BL centric, a good deal of it will end up on http://planets-suite.sourceforge.net/.

I’ve just finished setting up a new Planets instance for development, and have decided to move away from the current database configuration, which is:

The PREMIS Editorial Committee decided at their last meeting to flesh out the current PREMIS “intellectual entities” entity and is inclined to treat it as a type of “preservation object” as was suggested in the Planets model. This is a simple and elegant solution which increases the scope of PREMIS but not the size of the PREMIS dictionary. It even eliminates the semantic unit “linkingIntellectualEntity”. And it will make it possible to directly associate agents and events with an intellectual entity.

Planets was a great success, and I’m proud to have been a part of it. We’ve done a lot of great work, written a lot of documents, created some pretty decent software, and made as much of it as widely available as we possibly can. We’ll be publishing the documentation through this site, and the code is up on SourceForge. We’re currently setting up the development and issue-tracking environment, and then we can get down to the real business and work out what we want to build with all we’ve learned…