SCAPE 2nd Year Review
The second year review of the FP7 Collaborative project SCAPE took place on April 18-19, 2013 at the AIT office in Vienna. As I have recently received the final written report of this review, I thought I would share some results with the preservation community.
From the new OPF Chairman
As many of you already know, I have taken over the role of Chairman of the Board of the Open Planets Foundation from Adam Farquhar as of February 1, 2012.
Clearly, Adam has already presided over an enormous achievement, first in conceiving and establishing the Open Planets Foundation, and second in bringing the OPF to the point where it is a stable, viable organisation that is both self-sustaining and debt-free. On behalf of the Board, I thank him and applaud his efforts.
Archival Institutions and the Endowment Model
The following post is based on my contribution to the Dagstul Seminar “Is the Future of Preservation Cloudy?” in November 2012:
Format Registry Challenge, Part Three
Somewhat later than planned, I present here my final installment on the Format Registry Challenge.
During this “experiment” I have spent some time becoming acquainted with the Git version control system, working with both Windows msysgit and the Eclipse Git plugin EGit. One result is that my prototype registry source code (and associated war archive) is available on GitHub:
Format Registry Challenge, Part Two
Before I started with format editing, I realized that it would be very simple to implement cool URLs for file formats. The only difficulty was that Tapestry associates pages with Java classes, and “x-fmt” is not an allowed Java class name. This meant implementing URL re-directs, which is a special topic in Tapestry. Tapestry does not believe in heavily modifying the web.xml, almost all configuration takes part in so-called filter classes.
Accepting the Format Registry Challenge
Last week I was at home in bed for four days with a bad back. I could not really type, but I could browse, so I did have an opportunity to catch up on the recent OPF blog entries. I was particularly interested in the discussions regarding a new Format Registry. I am an amateur Java programmer at best, but I enjoy getting my hands dirty now and again, so I decided to take up Adam’s challenge: how far could I get with a format registry application in one week?