Open Planets Foundation – A community hub for digital preservation

Chris Rusbridge recently kicked off a discussion about where to find information about some old file formats – he was finding it very difficult to find what he needed.

Readers of this blog might find his article interesting:

http://unsustainableideas.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/so-what-was-that-twitter-rant-against-pronom-all-about/

OK, not really the answers, just more questions!  But a few weeks back I sent round a draft of a registry guidelines document, asking for feedback.  I had included in that document a list of questions that we needed to consider and this post presents some of the answers I received, plus some answers I have tried to supply myself.  

I was recently re-reading a Planets project report from 2008, “Representation Information Registries” by Adrian Brown (PC/3-D7 if that means anything to you). It has a nice summary of the purpose of representation information registries that I thought was worth sharing: (extract in italics).

The National Archives of the Netherlands have been looking at approaches to preservation of databases for some time, going back at least as far as the Digital Preservation Testbed project (2000-2003). 

I mentioned in this recent post that the next step for our work at the Nationaal Archief on representation information registries was to prepare a set of guidelines on publishing representation information, with the aim of making sure that we can easily make use of each other’s published knowledge.

On 13 and 14 April 2011 I took part in the UDFR Stakeholder meeting in Washington DC.  The UDFR team had invited around 25 people, mainly from the institutions represented on the UDFR governing body, plus a few others including me, representing the National Archives of the Netherlands and OPF. 

The UDFR team presented their progress and plans for the project and invited feedback and what turned out to be a lively discussion.

Dave Tarrant of Southampton University (with co-authors Steve Hitchcock and Les Carr) has recently published a paper in the International Journal of Digital Curation: “Where the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Meet Format Risk Management: P2 Registry”.

This describes the work Dave has done on creating a Linked Data registry (‘P2’) to hold information about file formats from PRONOM, DBpedia and elsewhere (which has in turn influenced the recent OPF work on file format registries).

A couple of months ago I reported on this blog that the OPF was beginning a project to investigate options for a new approach to file format registries.  We’ve just released the second report of this activity: “A New Registry for Digital Preservation: Conceptual Overview“.

I’ve just started a small assignment for the OPF to investigate the options for a new file format registry, part of the toolbox needed for long-term preservation of digital material by archives, libraries and other memory institutions.