Open Planets Foundation

One of the Open Planets Foundation’s main roles in the SCAPE project is to provide stewardship for, and ensure longevity of the SCAPE software outputs.

Who are you?

I’m Rui Castro. I work at KEEP SOLUTIONS since 2010 where I have the roles of Director of Infrastructures, project manager and researcher. Before joining KEEP SOLUTIONS, I was part of the team who developed RODA, the digital preservation repository used by the Portuguese National Archives.

I’ve started to publish some of my notes on digital preservation. It’s mostly a collection of ‘war stories’ and summaries of some of the little experiments I’ve carried out over the years, but never had time to write up properly. The idea of publishing these stories is inspired in part by XFNSTN, but also by my experience co-coordinating the AQuA workshops and from observing the success of the SPRUCEdp project.

In short, I think we need to share more war stories, not just the occasional full research paper, but also the small stuff, and the failures. Maybe I can start the ball rolling by sharing mine. I’d be interested to know if anyone else out there is interested in sharing theirs.

Here’s a little newsbulletin about FIDO, the open source file format identification tool of OPF.

It seems that the use of FIDO is growing the last few months. I am getting responses by e-mail and through the Github issuetracker from all over the world, ranging from requests for help, giving suggestions for improvement and even some bugfixes. Thanks and please keep them coming!

If you’ve not already read it, I urge you to go and read Ben Fino-Radin’s piece on XFN STN, called:

“IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO SAVE A HARD DRIVE”.

I found it both truthful and inspiring…