Planets Way, London, highlights

Twitter: jisckeepit Planets Way, London, day 1: colour, depth, and joined-up thinking (in parts) (11:24 AM Feb 10th)

I thought it might help to fill in a little detail for this tweet. This is a highlights package, so if you want a comprehensive report of proceedings at this event, I suggest you see this blog report on day 1 of Digital Preservation the Planets Way.

A couple of caveats. I wasn’t feeling great that day, so after a slow start I arrived by mid-morning break. The following seems to be the highlight of what I missed.

Twitter kevingashley Ross King – great 30-minute intro to whys and hows of dig preservation, incentives, markets, risks,… (9:59 AM Feb 9th)

Post-break seemed distinctly black-and white, literally, when it came to the slides. BTW, that’s the second caveat. No slides are available on the Planets site yet.

UPDATE (February 17, 2010): within hours of posting this the presentations became available (totally unconnected I’m sure), but it’s not ideal. Instead of being able to link individually to each highlighted talk, there is simply a downloadable zip file that, presumably, gives you everything from the day (the location of this zip file was sent in an email to delegates, and I can’t see it on the Web site for this event, so grab it now in case it is withdrawn for allcomers!)

So to the colour: Manfred Thaller showed how a simple migration of an abstract colour image can result in a different image.

Twitter WilliamKilbride Manfred ‘comparison is simple: get people to look at every file’. 1,000,000 files=10,416 working days. Perhaps automate? (12:32 PM Feb 9th)

This is the technical, practical, hard end of digital preservation, concerned with identifying and preserving the characteristics of digital objects, and this was a graphic account of the framework, tools and means to manage this problem for large volumes of content.

Depth: Hannes Kulovits could not have packed more into a half hour presentation on preservation planning with Plato.

Twitter kevingashley PLATO uses freemind mind map tool as part of process; @cardcc would approve! (2:55 PM Feb 9th)

Hannes reminds me of KeepIt colleague Dave Tarrant, a great thinker, implementer, enthusiast, and speed presenter (1, 2). There was enough content here for two days, so it’s fortunate we have that time in our KeepIt course module 4 (18-19 March, Southampton, one-off places may be available), where Hannes, Dave and Andi Rauber will link tools for preservation workflow and planning in a real repository context.

Joined-up thinking: this was provided by the returning Ross King.

Twitter kevingashley Ross King has removed his tie because ‘this is a more technical presentation.’ Quite right too 🙂 (3:46 PM Feb 9th)

Planets is a big pan-European project of many years that completes its tour of duty in May. It has produced a lot of outputs, as this event attests. Surely the critical feature of an event that seeks to make overall sense of all this is how it joins up. In my journalist way of thinking, which puts the point of the story at the top, this is where the day should have started. I asked people and I was pretty sure I hadn’t missed this. So by the time Ross spoke for a second time, towards the end of the day, I thought the time for join-up had passed, but it was quickly clear that here it was. At last! My impression was that the slides captured most of this, even without the erudite commentary. I won’t attempt to summarise Planets join-up here, but if you can find the slides for this event, this is where I recommend you start, even if for some reason Planets Way, London, chose not to.