As I have previously blogged, our community's attempts to share knowledge and experience of digital preservation tools has been a triumph of good-willed enthusiam over coordination and collaboration. Rather than pooling our tool knowledge we have spread it around the web in list after list and registry after registry. The result is not particularly helpful. Finding the right tool for the job, remains a challenge. COPTR (Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry) is an attempt to address this challenge by collating the contents of existing registries and then replacing them with a new community owned registry.
This registry will not belong to any individual organisation, instead it will be owned and supported by the community. It will be wiki based, making it easy for anyone in the community to contribute. And it will provide a feed of data for anyone wanting to exploit the registry information in creative ways.
This effort has the support of the Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation initiative and is backed by an initial group of organisations who have agreed to contribute their registry data.
A demonstrator for COPTR has been produced and is available for viewing here. Feedback on this demonstrator, offers of support, or contributions of registry data would be greatly appreciated and should be posted as a comment on this blog, or emailed to "p (dot) r (dot) wheatley (at) leeds (dot) ac (dot) uk" as is appropriate.
May 30, 2013 @ 11:24 am CEST
Thanks for the offer Maurice, this is much appreciated!
May 30, 2013 @ 11:22 am CEST
Hi Paul,
Of course I have to handle this through formal routing, but I am sure NANETH would be interested in hosting an instance.
Maurice
May 30, 2013 @ 10:46 am CEST
Hi Maurice,
Hosting and longevity are important issues to consider. OPF has offered to host to begin with, and I have offers from other institutions in case we need a "backup". Sharing a feed of data should help with some of the issues you've raised, but yes we could go further and share the wiki database. Something to consider once we're up and running perhaps…
Paul
May 30, 2013 @ 10:43 am CEST
Hi Ross,
Just Solve is certainly the closest I've seen to what I think we need, but would need to go quite a bit further as it's pretty rudimentary at the moment. Thanks very much for the feedback offer!
Paul