Open Planets Foundation – A community hub for digital preservation

In my previous post on formats, I ended up leaning towards a wait-and-see approach to format registry design. Unfortunately, I don’t really have that luxury. The SCAPE project needs to collect more format information to assist preservation planning and other processes. We even have some effort available to help build and/or fill a registry. But which registry should we try fill? Or should we go it alone and make a new one?

Bill’s earlier post and this one from Chris Rusbridge have spurred me to try to describe what I discovered about PRONOM format records during my editable registry experiment. Building that site required a close inspection of the PRONOM Format Record data model, during which I realised that we commonly conflate two quite different ways of defining formats. I suspect we should start to tease them apart.

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

I’ve been keeping an eye on the #anadp11 Twitter backchannel, particularly the discussion about standards. I’m not there, so I don’t know what points have been made, but I want to try to head off a common misconception. Standards are wonderful things, but the standard itself is not enough. It’s the social consensus built by the standardisation process that counts, and that ensures the standard will be adopted and sustained.

I’ve finally had time to consider David Rosenthal’s response to my argument in favour of format normalisation as a preservation strategy. While I largely agree with his position on format obsolescence (with some caveats I’ll return to in a future post), we do appear to disagree on a more fundamental level – on what it is we are actually trying to preserve.

After Ross’s post, I thought I’d better follow up on my format registry thoughts and show you all my response to Adam’s challenge. Using my weapon of choice, I was able create and populate a web site for collaboratively editing PRONOM data in just over one week’s worth of my spare time (six days FTE).

As David Rosenthal pointed out, as long as there is a piece of commercial software or an open source project capable of accessing a format, it cannot be considered truly obsolete. I agree, but I fear this this ‘absolute’ format obsolescence is a poor proxy for the real problem, which is to ensure that our content is not just kept safe, but also remains accessible to our readers both now and in the (near) future. I am perfectly able to compile an open source software application, but I’m not everybody. Indeed, the British Library is committed to providing continuous access for a wide range of people who are almost entirely not me.

I just wanted to point out a very interesting discussion on format obsolescence: The Half-Life of Digital Formats, A Puzzling Post From Rob Sharpe and Rob Sharpe’s Case For Format Migration. I think this is a very important issue, and I think we must address it as it cuts to the core of what the Planets tools are for. 

At the hackathon it was clear that the identification discussion started by Fido represented an archetypal example of why this community wants to work together. No matter what the institution, whatever the context or workflow, we all need reliable tools for identifying files and formats. Of course, reliable identification requires reliable identifiers, and so the discussion about the tools is necessarily intertwined with the idea of a format registry.

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…