The DigiPres Sandbox

A Place To Play With Tools For Digital Preservation

This is a very early stage experimental prototype. It may fall over, or simple cease to be.

The DigiPres Sandbox makes it possible to play with the tools supported by the DigiPres Toolbox, running it in the cloud so you can access it via your browser!

This works because it re-uses the MyBinder Service, which is a cloud-hosted instance of Binder^[1]. Binder was built to support reproducibility in scientific research, but can be used for all sorts of different things:

It can provide a safe, isolated environment for people to practice new skills, e.g. learning to use the command line with Library Carpentry.
It can be used to create and share real, concrete records of how to executed different processes and practices. Like the GLAM Workbench does for researchers accessing digital collections.

It can't keep any data around between sessions, and it's not suitable for sensitive data that can't be shared openly. For that kind of thing, we recommend tying out ViPER (from the Open Preservation Foundation).

Because it's running in the cloud, the DigiPres Sandbox can't affect anything on your computer - it's really just another web site! However, if you want to experiment on your own files, you can choose to upload them through the web interface.

Any files you upload to this cloud-hosted service should remain private, but this cannot be guaranteed. Do not upload sensitive material!

Note also that this is an an ephemeral service designed for experimentation and your session will be shut down and deleted if it appears not to be in use. For more detail about the behaviour and constraints of the MyBinder service, see the official user guidelines

By clicking the button below, you can fire up a remote Linux session with a Jupyter Lab interface, and start experimenting...

Please be patient, as the service is sometimes heavily loaded it might take a minute or two to before things get started. Check the MyBinder status page for issues, and consider trying these direct links to specific services: ovh, gesis, curvenote.

Finally, please use the File > Shutdown menu option to close the session down when you've finished.

Not that Binder. ↩︎