Open Planets Foundation

Over the last weeks at several events Paul Wheatley of the British Library showed examples of bit rot in an image collection of the BL.

Planets did lots of R&D into preservation and long term access and provided background and breakthrough thinking on many of the technical challenges.

But Paul’s tenacity on this subject bit rot triggered me to open a Problem, Requirement, Use Case sequence in the “what we need” section of the OPF wiki. 

http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/REQ/Home

http://www.dev8d.org/

For preservation and beyond, broad and reliable format identification has proven to be a critical shared problem across many institutions. Recent discussions on the OPF blogs have illustrated this point, and showed that we all like using DROID and Fido but would also like to improve them.

A couple of weeks ago we announced the market research into the potential of Digital Preservation Practices and Tools outside its traditional market Libraries and Archives.

Last week the report was presented to an audience consisting of the business school examination board and the customer (OPF, Adam Farquhar and myself). Both Adam and I where impressed by the quality and the amount of work the team managed to complete in such a short period.

It is part OPF’s mission and plan to sustain tools and practices from Planets and other R&D initiatives relevant to digital preservation and long term access. Most Software products from R&D projects run Software prototypes on platforms that are suitable for R&D purposes. From a development perspective totally OK and fine as long as there is no serious intention to deploy these tools and practices in production.

OPF has established a Technical and Architecture Advisory Board to provide technical leadership to member organisations and to offer technical advice to the OPF Board of Directors.

The Technical Board comprises Senior Developers and Architects from member organisations.They have a keen interest in engaging the developer community and actively participating in the decision-making processes to support the development of production quality software.

Big big thank you to the IISH for hosting and supporting the OPF Hackathon. We had more people attending then originally planned and IISH really helped out in every aspect, their flexibility with regards to meeting rooms and catering was absolutely fantastic. Venue and facilities where perfect for our event, as was hospitality and support of IISH staff.

OPF foresees a potential market in commercial industry once awareness and subsequently compliance on long-term access become reality. This will have immediate impact on policies, practices and workflow in major enterprises. Major changes in compliance and change in industry are often driven by the major business consultancy firms such as IBM Global Services (formerly Price Waterhouse Coopers), KPMG, Deloitte, Accenture, Ernst & Young and many others. Consultancy firms are strategic partners to gain access to industry.

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.