Publications

The preservation or conservation of digital art confronts us with a range of challenges, eclipsing many of the difficulties posed by more mainstream digital resources like documents and images. Preservation of art may itself be an impossible goal; instead, one might realistically aim only to create and collate sufficient documentation capable of conveying meaning and impact to a future audience, with perhaps one eye on its recreation where necessary at a later date. The Planets project is creating vocabularies and frameworks to describe the attributes that give a digital artwork its value. The latest developments are described in this report. [PDF, 374KB]

Emulation used as a long-term preservation strategy offers the potential to keep digital objects in their original condition and experience them within their original computer environment. However, having just an emulator in place is not enough. To apply emulation as a fully fledged strategy, an automated and user-friendly approach is required. This cannot be done without knowledge and contextual information of the original software. This paper combines the existing concept of a view path, which captures the contextual information of software, together with new insights into improving the concept with extra metadata. It provides regularly updated instructions for archival management to preserve and access its artefacts. The view-path model requires extensions to the metadata set of the primary object of interest and depends on additionally stored secondary objects for environment recreation like applications or operating systems. This article also addresses a strategy of rendering digital objects by running emulation processes remotely. The advantage of this strategy is that it improves user convenience while maximizing emulation capability.

The paper was presented by Dirk von Suchodoletz (University of Freiburg) at iPRES 2008 in September 2008 in London, and was published in IJDC, Issue 3, vol. 4, 2009. [PDF, 458KB]

The Planets project is happy to announce its eighth newsletter, Planetarium. This newsletter features a spotlight on Preservation Planning and presents the emulation preservation strategy and also contains articles about how the Planets technology partners put Planets into practice. In addition you will find a presentation of the results from a Planets Briefing for suppliers and vendors in Brussels on 5-6 June 2009. The newsletter also contains a News round up and a list of Planets publications and presentations at events. [PDF, 686KB]

This document contains the first iteration for a design for recommender systems in the
preservation planning tool Plato. The integration of such support systems shall reduce the effort
needed to create a preservation plan and enable preservation planning for less experienced
users [PDF, 234KB]

Through analysis of a survey of the used file formats at cultural heritage institutions an inventory of preservation action tools has been made and the areas where tools are missing identified. The report provides an important insight into the status of digital preservation and of digitization, and it helps to identify the need for new research and development of new tools. [PDF, 271KB]