Andy Jackson is Digital Preservation Specialist at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)
Following the re-launch event last week, I wanted to give a summary of the state of the Community-Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry (COPTR).
The full slides from the re-launch are available via the event page and also here as a single web page. But the crucial details are that COPTR is back, and we (the Digital Preservation Coalition and the Open Preservation Foundation) are going to do our best to support the community around COPTR so we can find each other, and work out how to help COPTR thrive.
You can find full details on the service status and sustainability here: COPTR Service Status & Sustainability · digipres · Discussion #66.
This support plan includes using the Preservation Registries Special Interest Group as a forum for helping people contribute to COPTR and related resources, through a new series of Online Collaboration Cafés events running fortnightly on Thursdays, alternating between two different time-zone slots (so hopefully every four weeks, in your time zone!). The first one is this Thursday 5th of February at 4pm (UTC), and the first 'late for the UK' session is on Thursday the 5th of March at 11pm (UTC).
Please check the PR-SIG page for full details, and join the PR-SIG Mailing List to get the links to the calls and join in the conversation.
One great idea that came up during the launch event was to run a "Deprecation Café". spending some time working together to check the existing entries to see if they are out of date or need review. I'm planning to spend the first Collaboration Café working on that.
Another interesting question that arose was how best to adapt what we have to highlight the tools different places use? Some of the tool lists are so long they can feel overwhelming! What could we do to help people find the tools that they should probably start with?
Hopefully, the Collaboration Cafés and the mailing list will provide a place where we can explore ideas like these. However, I know this won't suite everyone. In particular, it's not a very effective way to reach out to people new to digital preservation. So I've also put out a call for other ideas and volunteers for growing this community. If there's other efforts I can help out with (if only by simply publicising them), please let me know!