Open Planets Foundation

The AIT Austrian Institute of Technology is an Austrian research institute with a European format and focuses on the key infrastructure issues of the future. The AIT, which comprises five independent and performance-driven departments (Energy, Mobility, Health & Environment, Safety & Security and Foresight & Policy Development), works in close collaboration with industry and customers from public institutions, striving to increase their added value through innovation and new technologies.

AIT is strategically positioned as a key player in the Austrian and European innovation system by performing applied research for and enabling the market exploitation of innovative infrastructure related solutions. This functionality of “bridging the gap between research and technology commercialisation” is seen as a fundamental role for commercialisation of new technologies and strengthening economic development.

A further indication of AIT’s international competitiveness can be seen in the company’s intensive involvement in the research and technology programmes of the European Commission, a context in which the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology cooperates with other European research institutes and companies to establish new partnerships. This is an important means of exchanging application-oriented scientific findings with other stakeholders. The AIT Safety and Security Department, responsible for work in the Planets project, has a research field dedicated to the topic of digital preservation and will coordinate the Planets follow-up Integrated Project SCAPE.

The Austrian National Library is the main scientific library of the Republic of Austria with a history rich in tradition dating to the 14th century. It offers access to and professionally competent advice on its own holdings (around 7.5 million objects) and links to international electronic resources and digital library services. The Library is required by media law to receive a copy of every publication appearing in Austria, including university theses and (offline) electronic publications. ONB currently participates in a national working group for legal deposit regulation for online publications as well.

The Library is committed to preserve a variety of digital material including deposited electronic (online and offline) publications in various formats, electronic theses, e-prints, offline media on various carriers, digital surrogates emerging from large-scale in-house digitisation projects and material resulting from web harvesting. The Library is a national focal point for digital preservation in Austria and recently organized the UNESCO conference “Long-Term Preservation in the Digital Age” in March 2005. ONB is also co-organizer of a “Chinese-European Workshop on Digital Preservation” (Beijing, July 2004) and the International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects and the European Conference on Research and Advanced Development for Digital Libraries, both in September 2005.

The British Library (BL) co-ordinated the Planets project and currently hosts the Open Planets Foundation. As the national library of the United Kingdom, the BL provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world’s largest and most comprehensive research collection. The British Library’s collections include 150 million items, in over 400 languages, from every era of written human history beginning with Chinese oracle bones dating from 300 BC, right up to the latest e-journals.

The Library passed a major milestone in November 2009 as the 500,000th item was added to the Digital Library System. The long-term storage facility now contains e-journals, digital sound recordings, born-digital material received through voluntary arrangements with publishers, more than 65,000 digitised 19th century books and more than three million pages from historic newspapers.

The Danish National Archives holds the records of the central bodies of the Danish government such as ministries and agencies as well as digital records for a number of municipalities and regions.

Since the mid 1970s the National Archives has received transfers of digital records and was among the first national archives in the world to allow fully digital record keeping. The high level of digitisation of the Danish administration means that the Danish National Archives each year receives hundreds of digital transfers of data and documents from the IT-systems of the agencies and other government bodies.

The Royal Library, Denmark is a National Library with the obligation to preserve Denmark’s digital cultural heritage for future use. It is also a university library preparing to undertake the role of an institutional repository. International cooperation, e.g. IIPC (International Internet preservation coalition), is one of the ways the library tries to be at the cutting edge of digital preservation research and development. Also, staff from KB-DK tries to be represented at conferences and workshops dealing with all aspects of digital preservation.

The State and University Library, Denmark (SB) is an institution of the Danish Ministry of Culture. It functions as:

National Library
The SB is a legal deposit library. It receives a copy of all Danish publications, whether in printed or in digital form. It houses the national newspaper collection, the national media archive and is the national loan centre for public libraries and small special libraries.

University Library
The State & University library is the main library of Aarhus University. In addition to its everyday services (lending, reference service etc.) the SB library buys books, periodicals and other materials for departmental libraries in the university. Through the use of a union catalogue these materials are also accessible to the public.

Research facility
Like other libraries, archives and museums, which come under the Ministry of Culture, the SB is a research institution. Its main research fields are media, information and library research as well as research based on the library’s national and special collections.

Digital Library
As a result of a new legal deposit law, effective from July 2005, the library has embarked on two initiatives; it has begun to digitise radio and television material broadcasted in Denmark in real time. This has already resulted in a digital radio/TV archive of over 600TB of data and over 1 million hours of broadcast material. Together with the Royal Library in Copenhagen it has also started to archive the Danish internet content. As a result of these two new initiatives, the library expects to add 200TB of data per year. The library is also engaged in digitising its audio collection; it currently holds more that 450,000 audio tracks in digital form.

Goportis is the name of the Leibniz Library Network for Research Information. The three libraries behind this partnership are: the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) in Hannover, the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED) in Cologne/Bonn and the German National Library of Economics (ZBW) in Kiel/Hamburg.

Goportis is the expert partner for the supply of electronic and printed full-text documents, licences, non-textual materials, digital preservation and Open Access. Apart from these fields of competence the three partners are responsible for acquiring, developing and making available scientific information, publications and other media in their specific subjects.

Microsoft Research’s involvement in Planets has been focused on identifying strategies for using Office Open XML standards for archiving and preservation of digital content. The Microsoft Office Open XML (Office OpenXML) formats represent a significant advance in representing information contained in textual documents, spreadsheets, and multimedia presentations in an open format, based on the XML standard. Microsoft believes that the use of the Microsoft Office Open XML formats can maximize long-term usage of documents and provide the value to the organisations and services concerned with archiving and preservation. 

Microsoft Research (MSR) was established in 1991 and has since developed into a unique entity among corporate research labs, balancing an open academic model with an effective process for transferring its research to product development teams. Microsoft researchers work across more than 55 disciplines, including areas that are directly related to the authoring, management, metadata creation, access security, and analysis of digital documents. Although most of the researchers pursue long-term goals that extend far beyond the current product cycles, they also work closely with product groups to transfer knowledge and help turn their discoveries into functional offerings. Through collaboration between Microsoft Research and Planets partners, the project has benefited  from technical expertise of Microsoft product teams and researchers who are actively engaging with the community on devising methods and tools for digital preservation.

The National Archives of The Netherlands has been involved in digital preservation since the beginning of the 1990s. It has a legal duty to provide access to and preservation of archival records through time, both paper and digital. It has longstanding experience managing and preserving paper records. It provides access to government records and other historical sources to a broad audience, also by using modern channels such as the world wide web. The Archive has been involved in development of a preservation testbed since 2000, the start of a joint venture with the Ministry of the Interior. This work has continued through into DELOS and a project on emulation in cooperation with the Dutch National Library.

The National Library of The Netherlands (KB) fosters the national infrastructure for scientific information and plays an important role in the permanent access to digital information at an international level. The e-Depot, the world’s first digital archiving system for academic publications, now contains more than 15 million articles (15 TB). The KB aims to scale up the e-Depot in the next years to contain 700 TB by 2013.

As a national library in a smaller country with an international orientation, the KB is uniquely positioned to serve as a trustworthy steward for the scholarly record. Next to its national deposit collection, the e-Depot contains the digital archive of the Dutch academic institutional repositories, the Dutch web archive from 2008 onwards and the master archive of national digitisation projects.

In the 1990’s the KB expanded its mission into the emerging international world of information provision. KB has made agreements with most of the key international publishers in the field of STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) including Elsevier, Springer and BioMed Central to have their online journals archived in the e-Depot for long term preservation and access.

The KB intends to develop a sustainable business model for the e-Depot which will reflect both public and private responsibility for our digital scholarly and cultural heritage. The KB has been involved in many international research projects in the field of digital libraries and hosts the offices of The European Library (TEL) and Europeana. Currently, the KB is working on the development of a new digital preservation system, to be taken into production in 2012.

Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resrouces (SULAIR) supports teaching, learning and research in disciplines pursued by the University, conducts operations and programs ranging widely across the information domain, and engages in global efforts to advance library services. Key areas for innovation include:

• Scholarly e-publishing: HighWire Press
• Academic publishing: the Stanford University Press
• Digital archiving: the Stanford Digital Repository, LOCKSS /CLOCKSS, National Geospatial Digital Archive
• Digitization initiatives: book, map, and image scanning labs, media preservation lab, Parker on the Web, Google Book Search partnership
• Open Source development: Sakai, LOCKSS, Fedora, JHOVE2, AIMS
• Collection development: growing collections of print and electronic resources in all formats
• Learning spaces: 15 buildings with a variety of technology-enhanced spaces designed for individual study, collaborative work, and teaching
• Academic technology support: dedicated support for faculty and students using technology in research and teaching provided within departments, student residences, and within libraries across campus
• Research support: instruction and consultation provided in topics including basic & advanced research techniques, multimedia creation, use of numeric data and statistical software, and GIS

The National Library of Wales, 100 years old in 2007, is one of the oldest and most important of the national institutions in Wales. It is Wales’s pre-eminent library and archive. It is a legal deposit library and holds a wide range of media types, including books, periodicals and newspapers, archives and manuscripts, maps, pictures and photographs, sound and moving images and electronic material. Every year, it welcomes over 90,000 visitors to its building in Aberystwyth and receives over 1.4 million virtual visits. The NLW is committed to improving access to its building, collections and services. It has achieved this through the development of its visitor centre, its educational programme and the extension of its electronic resources.  Sustainable access is a priority for the NLW and it has developed strategies for the preservation of its analogue and digital holdings.