Planets Project

PLANETS (Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services), a forty-eight month project funded by the European Commission Information Science and Technologies Sixth Framework Programme (FP6 Call 5), officially began on the 1st June 2006. The EU will contribute up to 8.6 million euro of the total project spend of around 14 million euro. The PLANETS project 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 scalable infrastructure.

PLANETS will develop practical tools for characterisation of digital objects and tools to enable future representation of file formats. A preservation planning module will be developed that will enable organisations to set up preservation plans, and prepare and execute actions, to ensure perpetual access to their archived collections. The project partners will share their results with the digital preservation community as soon as possible and invite other organisations to give feedback and join PLANETS in setting up a digital preservation testbed.

A key objective of PLANETS is to create an environment within which commercial services to support different aspects of the preservation lifecycle can flourish. Providing a way to integrate stand alone tools, products and services into a viable preservation infrastructure is difficult. The PLANETS interoperability framework, through the publication of open, common interfaces, will provide the foundations for a competitive market place to which third party vendors can bring preservation tool and service products.

PLANETS project brings together the unique experience required to research, develop, deliver and productise practical digital preservation solutions. The consortium includes, European national libraries and archives, leading research institutions, and technology companies: The British Library, The National Library of the Netherlands Dutch Royal Library, Austrian National Library, The Royal Library of Denmark, State and University Library of Denmark, The National Archives of the Netherlands, The National Archives of England, Wales and the United Kingdom, Swiss Federal Archives, University of Cologne, Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, HATII at the University of Glasgow, Vienna University of Technology, ARC Seibersdorf Research GmbH (AT), IBM Netherlands B.V., Microsoft Research Ltd (UK) and Tessella Support Services Plc (UK).

ee also

* CASPAR digital preservation project
* Digital obsolescence
* Digital preservation
* Repository

External links

* [http://www.planets-project.eu/ Planets Project]
* [http://www.bl.uk/ The British Library]
* [http://www.tessella.com/ Tessella Support Services]