Planets News

A second Planets White Paper summarising the findings of interviews with 18 of the world's leading IT companies is available now to download from the Planets web-site.

The work which was led by Consortium partners the Swiss Federal Archives and Tessella aimed to explore current provision of, and emerging market-place for tools and services to support long-term management of digital content. The resulting paper is a companion to the Market Survey White Paper released on 11 May 2010. More Info

Three case studies describe how the Royal Library of Denmark is using Planets characterisation and planning tools to profile digitised folklore collections, prior to transfer into the Library's digital archive; the Statsbiblioteket's use of Planets characterisation services to profile collections prior to ingest into its Fedora-based Digital Object Management System and research by the National Archive of the Netherlands into the potential application of emulation to preserve dynamic Government records such as databases and spreadsheets. More

The report presents the findings of interviews with over 76 civil servants in 17 Government agencies in the Netherlands and Belgium. It aims to establish how communication and information are created, managed, shared and preserved in Government settings, and to provide information managers with insights into issues to be addressed with recommendations. Read the full report

Planets source code and supporting documentation are now publicly available from the Planets SourceForge site.

The SourceForge site hosts the source code for Planets Suite software tools, guidance on how to install and deploy the suite and a pre-configured JBoss application server on which it depends. There is also a dedicated Contributors’ area for developers to experiment with code and exchange ideas.
Download source code and install the Planets Suite

On Tuesday 18 May 2010, Planets will deposit a TimeCapsule to draw widespread attention to the physical and electronic challenges around preserving digital information for the long-term.

Media have been invited to attend the deposit from 10:00 CET deep within the Swiss Alps at Swiss Fort Knox, Saanen, Switzerland – one of Europe's leading secure data storage facilities.

The TimeCapsule contains five of today’s most common types of digital objects. Each is converted into formats to help preserve them for the long-term and stored on a range of media from punch-cards to paper, microfilm, floppy disc, audio tape, CD, DVD, USB and Blu Ray.

While facilities such as Swiss Fort Knox can safeguard the physical data, the TimeCapsule will demonstrate the impact time and technological change has on our ability to access and use it. From the files down to the 1s and 0s the Planets TimeCapsule documents the genome of the five objects to potentially enable their reconstruction in future.

Researchers will be able to investigate how much of the TimeCapsule's content will or can be made accessible and usable with the information provided. An online version will make it possible to experiment with technology to preserve its contents. The TimeCapsule lends itself to replication for libraries, archives and museums for research or public exhibit to demonstrate the scale of the task to be mastered. Find out more about the Planets TimeCapsule and see the latest news and photographs

A White Paper summarising the findings of the Planets Market Survey is available now to download from the Planets website. The survey, conducted by Tessella, of over 200 organisations worldwide aimed to understand the requirements for long-term management of digital content. Contributors. More Info

With the release of version 1.1, the Planets Testbed has been opened up for external usage. Users are invited to execute experiments on the behaviour of digital objects and tools in the Public Beta version of Testbed.

The Testbed v1.1 (Public Beta) offers an intuitive 6-step workflow enabling users to find out more about the behaviour of tools and digital objects in a digital preservation setting. In a scientifically sound environment, experiments on different preservation methods may be executed on an annotated set of data (Corpus).

V1.1 includes:

• Different experiment types that can be executed including migration and emulation


• A data set of almost 5000 annotated digital objects


• Analysis, characterisation and reporting options


• The possibility of integration with other preservation planning tools

For login information (or any question on the Planets Testbed) please contact our Helpdesk: helpdesktb@planets-project.eu

To get more information about the Planets Testbed have a look at http://testbed.planets-project.eu/testbed/

The Planets Testbed is a web application, that helps you to find out about the performance of tools. It offers a controlled hardware & software environment and provides structured processes for the arrangement and evaluation of experiments on preservation as well as a set of structured test data (Corpora).

Planets Testbed