Open Planets Foundation

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…

Planets was a great success, and I’m proud to have been a part of it. We’ve done a lot of great work, written a lot of documents, created some pretty decent software, and made as much of it as widely available as we possibly can. We’ll be publishing the documentation through this site, and the code is up on SourceForge. We’re currently setting up the development and issue-tracking environment, and then we can get down to the real business and work out what we want to build with all we’ve learned…