The digital preservation community is small and under resourced. This means we have to work together if we want to make a real impact. We're now seeing the emergence of a host of exciting crowd sourced or collaborative projects. Please help yourself and the rest of the community by contributing to these initiatives:
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Contribute to the Atlas of Digital DamagesVisual examples of digital preservation challenges, such as graphic corruption, can be incredibly useful in communicating the digital preservation message. Barbara Sierman blogged convincingly about the need for a collection of such images. Contributing to this Flickr group is a really easy way to get involved in DP community initiatives. Follow the Atlas on Twitter here @atlasofdd |
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Join the discussionDiscussion forums and active blogs provide the opportunity to share informal advice, get recommendations and discuss the finer points of digital preservation. By sharing both your intentions for digital preservation work and your results, you can ensure your work benefits from a wealth of community experience.
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Contribute to the Digital Preservation Wikipedia ProjectThe Wikipedia pages on digital preservation |
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Contribute to a file format initiativeEveryone knows we need a decent file format registry to support digital preservation activities. But so far most of our registries are pretty empty. Three new initiatives provide a cross section of opportunities for involvement: CRISP |
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Write up your digital preservation needs, and get them solvedDo you have an unsolved digital preservation challenge? Would you like someone to solve it for you? The Open Planets Foundation wiki captures information about specific Datasets or digital collections. These link to concrete digital preservation challenges or Issues. Once those Issues have been solved, they are written up as Solutions. Capturing the requirements of preservation practitioners enables developers to target their precious resources more effectively. Sharing our experiences in solving preservation Issues allows others to learn from the successes (and less successful approaches) |
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Describe a useful digital preservation toolFinding toolsets that automate your digital preservation processes and solve your challenges is not easy. Tool registries provide a way of browsing for useful solutions and learning from experiences others have had in applying them. The COPTR tool registry captures information about tools on an easy to edit wiki |
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Share or create digital object samplesImproving our digital preservation toolsets requires careful testing and evaluation of their performance. Sample data enables tool developers to easily try out their tools, discover bugs, and hone their tools ready for others to use. A test corpus can contain real digital objects from a collection, or be created specifically for exhibiting certain characteristics for testing purposes. Real data, particularly with examples of broken, badly formed or corrupted files can be particularly useful. For example, see this JP2k test corpus
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Analyse, share your data, evaluate and improveIn order to improve our digital preservation capability, we need to be able to analyse and evaluate our work in an effective manner. For example, we need to be able to compare and contrast tools and approaches, and we need to see how changes over time affect performance. Practising what we preach in this field means sharing our data about digital preservation. Dave Tarrant explains why this is a good idea |
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Enhance deep file characterisationDeep file characterisation enables validation, identification of preservation risks and extraction of metadata. In developing a new characterisation capability, begin with thorough research to identify existing code to re-use or build on, develop a focused command line tool, then consider turning it into a JHOVE2 module.
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All images sourced from the Noun Project, including: Question image by Henry Ryder, Swiss Army Knife image by Olivier Guin, Add folder image by Sergio Calcara, People image by T. Weber, Cross hairs image by __Lo._ and chain image by Adam Whitcroft.