Q. Why should I participate in cRIsp?
If you care about our ability to make sense of digital data, you'll know we need Representation Information to turn our 0s and 1s into meaningful and usable digital information. Existing RI and file format registries are lacking one really crucial thing: the data! That's what cRIsp is aiming to kick start.
Q. But don't we have representation information repositories for that sort of thing?
Yes, but they don't have adequate amount of content yet. That's where CRISP comes in.
Q. What's different about cRIsp?
cRIsp focuses on just getting the data. There's no fancy data model, no impressive interface. We just want to collect the data. What happens next is up to you.
We've set the bar for participation as low as possible in an effort to encourage as many people as possible to contribute.
Q. Sounds great! How do I contribute?
It's easy! The most important thing to do is to contribute URLs.
- Step 1: Find some rep info online that's relevant to your collection. Like a file format specification, for example.
- Step 2: Send it in! Either tweet it to @dpref (eg "@dpref Here's the PDF spec http;.//...") or fill in this very short form
, perhaps via the cRIsp bookmarklet. - Step 3: Revel in the satisfaction of having made a useful contribution to the digital preservation community. Simple!
If you want to get more involved than this, that's great. Keep reading... .
Q. What will happen to the URL's contributed to cRIsp?
After de-duplication and some curatorial work, we'll make the URLs available to web archives to be captured, preserved and shared as special collections. Just check out the spreadsheets. The results will be made available to other related initiatives as building blocks to create more structured and powerful RI capabilities.
Q. Right, I've contributed some URL's. Can I do more?
Yes! We would love help with a number of aspects of this initiative from curating the RI we capture, adding management facilities through to crawling and preserving the web sites. Please drop us a line if you'd like to get involved further: p dot r dot wheatley -at- leeds dot ac dot uk
Q. How sustainable is this approach?
This is a community initiative so that's really down to the community. if people don't get involved then it's not going to go anywhere. If they don't get involved it can only be because either a) they've already got all the RI they need, or b) they have a better solution. If that's really the case then that's great. But if not, then they should contribute. We can work together to solve this challenge and get the data, we just have to do it.
Q. Where can I get more information?
Check out our presentation from iPres 2012 or get in touch with the SPRUCE organisers.