Open Planets Foundation – A community hub for digital preservation

This is what the first year of OPF development on the Planets Suite codebase looks like…

The OPF is hosting its second hackathon at the University at Cologne.

Topics include:

• Results evaluation framework (REF)
• PLATO training
• Format identification tools training
• Database archiving requirements

Further information will be available soon.

Date: 31 August 2011 – 2 September 2011

Link:

Remote emulation has been a topic in digital preservation for a while. Several approaches to it have been explored and the feasibility of some stable prototype is pretty good. There are several different ways to achieve the separation into a server able to run the complex stuff and a rather simple client mostly limited to user in- and output. This concept of separation is used more and more often to run complex computer games over the network without requiring the installation and permanent updating of client software  on the user’s side.

In November 2010 JISC joined the OPF as a charter member. Its role has been to foster interest from the higher education sector in developing digital preservation tools and technologies. The OPF and JISC will work together to contribute to establishing a curriculum for teaching digital preservation practices and to advance research and development. JISC’s Digital Infrastructure Programme Manager, Neil Grindley, has blogged about why JISC joined the OPF here: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/and-the-answer-is/.

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

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.

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…