Welcome to the DigiPres Workbench

Tools, analysis and technical resources for practical digital preservation

This is an experimental prototype created as part of the Registries of Good Practice project. Things may evolve and break over time! See the Funding & Sustainability section below for more details.

The DigiPres Workbench is a collection of tools, reports, visualisations and tutorials to help you to preserve your digital collections.

Here's a high-level view of what this is for, what we're doing now, and what we're thinking of doing in the future (indicated by dashed and dotted boxes)...

You can use the menu on the left or the plots and links below to get started.

Click here for more statistics from format registries...

Click here for more information about formats...

Next steps

Here are some things you could try...

Read about the different types of 'registries' we've been looking at in order to help us understand what we really need.

Analyse and compare different data format registries, to find out which ones might help you understand your digital collections.

Use collection format profiles to compare your own collections against other collections and against the various format registries.

Read about how a ecological model of formats as different species allows us to use the gaps between format registries to estimate the total number of data formats across the digital world.

Use the DigiPres Sandbox to play with command-line DigiPres tools in the cloud without installing any software, or even leaving your browser.

Understand the data behind the index of publications related to digital preservation, and the networks beneath.

Explore the Workshop Resources & Activities that we're using to gather feedback on what's been built so far.

Inspirations

The DigiPres Workbench was inspired by:

The Wikidata for Digital Preservation portal by Katherine Thornton, Kenneth Seals-Nutt, Euan Cochrane & Carl Wilson.
The GLAM Workbench by Tim Sherratt.
Demystify and Demystify-lite by Ross Spencer.
The Siegfried format identification tool and benchmark tests by Richard Lehane.
Library of Congress Format Descriptions Visualization by Ashley Blewer.
The Virtual Preservation Environment for Research (ViPER) by The Open Preservation Foundation & The Dutch Digital Heritage Network.
The PLANETS Testbed (briefing paper, article)
Datasette and Datasette-lite. by Simon Willison.
The Observable Framework, which is the open source engine used to create and maintain this site.

Funding & Sustainability

The initial development of this site was funded by Yale University Library and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) as part of the Registries of Good Practice project.

These experiments are being designed with long-term sustainability in mind, and the DPC will endeavour to maintain and update this site in the future.

However, the purpose of these prototypes is to help us explore what is really needed and which approaches are more sustainable, so the content and function of this service may change radically over time.

We need your feedback in order to get this right, so please let use know what you think!

Contact

Contact information for the primary author, Andy Jackson, is available here. If that doesn't work, get in touch via the Digital Preservation Coalition.

We also hosts a monthly Preservation Registries Special Interest Group call, which is open to anybody interested in understanding or working on the information resources that make digital preservation possible.