Open Planets Foundation – A community hub for digital preservation

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

This week Bill Roberts, Asger Blekinge, Andy Jackson, Paul Wheatley, Bram van der Werf and I attended the DevCSI Developer Days in London. Next to the workshops, lightning talks, coding labs and Guru Sessions there were several challenges created by attending organizations. OPF also created two very interesting challenges.

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.

Percipio is a small tool I have developed. You can find the tool here https://github.com/blekinge/percipio

I will make a proper release soon, especially if anybody shows any interest. It has been heavily inspired by the now not-developed closed sourcec tool TrID http://mark0.net/soft-trid-e.html

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…

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.

Announced at last week’s iPres conference in Vienna, JISC are to become a charter member of the OPF.

The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) will host a round-table discussion at iPres 2010. It will take place on Wednesday 22 September at 17:30 – 19.00 at the Austrian National Library.

Digital preservation practitioners are invited to join us to:

Planets is delighted to announce that Bram van der Werf has been appointed as Executive Director of the Open Planets Foundation. Bram will take up his appointment on 1st June 2010. 

• 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

Covering everything from medical records to family photos, current estimates suggest that there are already exists over 100Gb of data for every individual person on the planet.  With data creation set to d