Planets - Preservation and Long-term Access to our Cultural and Scientific Heritage
The primary goal for Planets is to build practical services and tools to help ensure long-term access to digital cultural and scientific assets. The project will deliver an integrated production environment for the management of digital information preservation, with a special focus on the needs of libraries and archives.
- Project type: Integrated Project
- Start date: 1 June 2006
- Duration: 48 months
- EU funding: € 8 600 000
- Number of partners: 16
- Project coordinator: The British Library, UK
- Contact: Dr Adam Farquhar
Project description
This project aims to deliver an end product in the form of a downloadable "click-and-install" software package that supports the administration, configuaration, and deployment of preservation services and workflows. This will become available for other organisations to implement in an operational environment.
The system will support a number of key preservation functions:
- Preservation planning services that empower organisations to define, evaluate, and execute preservation plans
- methodologies, tools and services for characterisation of digital objects that can automatically analyse digital objects to establish significant properties
- innovative preservation action tools and services, to ensure rendering of the objects and keeping available the properties identified
- a testbed to provide a consistent and coherent evidence-base for the objective evaluation of different protocols, tools, services and preservation plans
- an Interoperability Framework to integrate seamlessly the tools and services to provide one easily managed preservation system
Integration and automation can be seen as the two prominent features of the Planets environment. The Planets Interoperability Framework will enable organisations to improve decision-making about long term preservation, ensure long-term access to their valued digital content and control the costs of preservation actions through increased automation and a scaleable infrastructure.
Parallel to technology development, Planets also has a dissemination and take-up programme which will pave the way for widest possible adoption of the project's results in the user community and enable commercial providers to compete in the emerging market for differentiated preservation services and tools.
The Planets consortium brings together the complimentary expertise of research institutes, technology vendors and leaders in the practical application of digital preservation technology and in the provision of preservation services. The project is further supported through the authority of European National Libraries and Archives having the legal responsibility and the legislative framework to safeguard and provide sustained access to digital cultural and scientific knowledge.
Technical work and intermediate results
The `Integrated Project` PLANETS comprises five technical sub-projects covering the development of planning services, methodologies, tools and services for characterisation of digital objects, innovative solutions for preservation actions, and an interoperability framework to seamlessly integrate tools and services in a distributed service network.
- The Preservation Planning sub-project is designed to provide the tools required for formulation, evaluation and execution of high-quality and cost-effective preservation plans with a view to these being able to be executed via a range of machine interpretable models. The first outcome of this sub-project is the preservation planning tool PLATO.
- The Preservation Characterisation sub-project is designed to develop tools and services to characterise the significant properties of digital objects (e.g. representation properties, inherent properties, including tools and services for automating measurement of these properties) in order to support development of preservation plans and validation of preservation actions (e.g. evaluating loss). The main development so far are the Extensible Characterisation and Description Language (XCDL) and the Extensible Characterisation Extraction Language (XCEL). A Comparator Tool to be used to validate preservation actions using XC*L has been prototyped.
- The Preservation Action sub-project is designed to provide solutions for performing preservation actions including tools, services and technologies. In this context, work has been done on the archiving of relational databases, emulation and remote access to emulation services.
- The Interoperability Framework sub-project is designed to integrate the PLANETSÂ’ deliverables into one simple, single downloadable package. Within this package, there will be role-based routines for administrators, preservation experts and business users.
- The Testbed sub-project is designed to develop a controlled environment for experimentation and evaluation, with metrics and benchmark content that allow comparison of tools and strategies.