Almost a year ago, I presented a proposal to the Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation (ANADP) group to create a community tool registry. I was frustrated by the profusion of tool registries and the lack of coordination between them. Pooling the knowledge in one place would result in a far better resource. It would be easier to discover new tools, to share experience in using them and to help avoid the tool development duplication we’ve seen so much of in the past. As ANADPII kicks off today in Barcelona, I’m very pleased to announce the beta launch of COPTR: the Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry.

FITS is a classic case of a great digital preservation tool that was developed with an initial injection of resource, and subsequently the creator (Harvard University) has then struggled to maintain it. But let me be very clear, Harvard deserves no blame for this situation. They’ve created a tool that many in our community have found particularly useful but have been left to maintain it largely on their own.

Wouldn’t it be great if different individuals and organisations in our community could all chip in to maintain and enhance the tool? Wrap new tools, upgrade outdated versions of existing tools, and so on? Well many have started to do this, including some injections of effort from my own project, SPRUCE. What a lovely situation to be in, seeing the community come together to drive this tool forward…

We are now into the final few months of the SPRUCE Project and we’re beginning to complete some key outputs from the project. A key aim has been to encourage and support digital preservation activity in the UK from both a technical and business perspective. So we wanted to support practitioners in bringing in the funding they need to make preservation happen. To that end, we’ve produced a toolkit that guides them through the process of writing a business case focused on digital preservation:

Rather than taking the usual report writing approach to creating this resource, we thought we’d follow some of the agile principles we’d been championing on SPRUCE and run a “book sprint“.

Last week we assembled a group of 30 practitioners and developers and and got down to some practical digital preservation work in what we call a SPRUCE Project Mashup. We’ve run quite a few of them now, but each one is a little different as the agenda is set by our participants and the challenges they bring to the table. I’m always a little nervous running an agile event like this.