Ross King's Blog

It is difficult to write that headline. After nearly four years of hard work, worry, setbacks, triumphs, weariness, and exultation, the SCAPE project is finally coming to an end. I am convinced that I will look back at this period as one of the highlights of my career. I hope that many of my SCAPE […]

The second year review of the FP7 Collaborative project SCAPE took place on April 18-19, 2013 at the AIT office in Vienna. As I have recently received the final written report of this review, I thought I would share some results with the preservation community. The review covered the second project period, from February 2012 […]

As many of you already know, I have taken over the role of Chairman of the Board of the Open Planets Foundation from Adam Farquhar as of February 1, 2013. Clearly, Adam has already presided over an enormous achievement, first in conceiving and establishing the Open Planets Foundation, and second in bringing the OPF to […]

The following post is based on my contribution to the Dagstul Seminar "Is the Future of Preservation Cloudy?" in November 2012: A growing number of archival institutions are turning towards POSE (Pay Once, Store Eternally) or Endowment models for funding their long-term digital archiving and preservation activities. The endowment model has a number of seductive […]

Somewhat later than planned, I present here my final installment on the Format Registry Challenge. During this “experiment” I have spent some time becoming acquainted with the Git version control system, working with both Windows msysgit and the Eclipse Git plugin EGit. One result is that my prototype registry source code (and associated war archive) […]

Before I started with format editing, I realized that it would be very simple to implement cool URLs for file formats. The only difficulty was that Tapestry associates pages with Java classes, and “x-fmt” is not an allowed Java class name. This meant implementing URL re-directs, which is a special topic in Tapestry. Tapestry does […]

Last week I was at home in bed for four days with a bad back. I could not really type, but I could browse, so I did have an opportunity to catch up on the recent OPF blog entries. I was particularly interested in the discussions regarding a new Format Registry. I am an amateur […]