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A consortium of national libraries and other digital preservation experts has warned that European organisations face the loss of electronic documents holding information potentially worth billions of Euros. As successive file formats are superseded and become obsolete, there is a danger that information held in such older formats may become difficult or impossible to retrieve – resulting in the loss of vast amounts of unique and valuable information.

To address this threat of a ‘digital black hole’, the EU is co-funding the consortium of national libraries, archives, research institutes and technology specialists. The PLANETS Project (Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services) will deliver a sustainable framework to enable long-term preservation of digital content, increasing Europe’s ability to ensure access in perpetuity to its digital information.

Funded through the Information Society Technologies (IST) R&D Programme, the project will enable organisations to improve decision-making about long term preservation, ensure long-term access to their valued digital content and control the costs of preservation actions through increased automation and scaleable infrastructure.

“The rapid advance of information technology is increasingly putting our digital heritage at risk,” says Adam Farquhar, Head of e-Architecture at the British Library, which is leading the PLANETS Project. “As past and current computer hardware and software becomes obsolete, digital information reliant on this technology becomes increasingly hard to find, view, search and re-use. There is a growing consensus on the need to act now to avoid a gaping hole in our cultural and scientific record.”

The PLANETS consortium estimates that EU member countries produce around 5 billion documents per year; of this total, around 2% (100 million documents per year) comprise information that is worth archiving. Around 2 million documents out of this sub-total are held in formats that constitute a long-term preservation risk. Taking into account the production costs of these documents – along with the estimated worth of the information to others – many millions of Euros-worth of information currently languishes in endangered formats.

The Planets consortium brings together the unique experience required to research, develop, deliver and productise practical digital preservation solutions. The consortium incorporates national libraries, national archives, research universities and technology companies, and includes: the British Library, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library, Netherlands), Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National Library), Statsbiblioteket (State and University Library, Denmark), Det Kongelige Bibliotek (Royal Library, Denmark), Nationaal Archief (National Archives, Netherlands), the National Archives (UK), Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv (Swiss Federal Archives), Technische Universitaet Wien (Technical University of Vienna), Universitat Freiburg (University of Freiburg), Universitat zu Koln (University at Cologne), HATII at the University of Glasgow (UK), ARC Seibersdorf research GmbH, IBM Nederland, Microsoft Research Limited (Cambridge, UK) and Tessella Support Services plc.

A key objective of PLANETS is to create an environment within which commercial services to support different aspects of the preservation lifecycle can flourish. Providing a way to integrate stand alone tools, products and services into a viable preservation infrastructure is difficult. The PLANETS Interoperability Framework, through the publication of open, common interfaces, will provide the foundations for a competitive market place to which third party vendors can bring preservation tool and service products.

Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, said: “European National Libraries and Archives are uniquely positioned to lead on this digital preservation initiative, having the legal responsibility and the legislative framework to safeguard digital information. A consortium such as PLANETS allows us to address a challenge the scale of which goes far beyond the capabilities of any single institution.”

The PLANETS Project will run for 4 years and officially began on the 1st June 2006. The EU will contribute 8.6M of the total project spend of 14M Euro. Further information on PLANETS can be found at:

http://www.planets-project.eu

For further information please contact: Ben Sanderson at the British Library Press Office (telephone 01937 546126, email: ben.sanderson@bl.uk)

NOTES TO EDITORS

The British Library is the national Library of the United Kingdom. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world’s largest and most comprehensive research collection.

The British Library’s vast collections include 13 million books, 7 million manuscripts, 4.5 million maps, 56 million patents, 3.5 million sound recordings, 8 million stamps, and 58 million newspapers in various formats. Further information is available on the Library’s website at www.bl.uk

The PLANETS project brings together European National Libraries and Archives, leading research institutions, and technology companies to address the challenge of preserving access to digital cultural and scientific knowledge. The four year project is funded by the European Commission Information Science and Technologies Framework Programme 6 Call 5 (FP6 Call 5).

To achieve this objective, PLANETS will:

• Develop Preservation Planning services that will empower organisations to define, evaluate, and execute preservation plans.  The plans will reflect the organisation’s preservation policies, as well as the content in its collections, and the way the content is used.
• Develop methodologies, tools and services for the Characterisation of digital objects in order to identify the best preservation plans.
• Evaluate existing tools and services to support Preservation Actions and the development of innovative solutions based on the integration of existing tools and on the design and implementation of new tools where an unfulfilled requirement can be demonstrated
• Establish a Preservation Test Bed to provide a consistent and coherent evidence-base for the objective evaluation of different preservation protocols, tools and services and for the validation of the effectiveness of preservation plans
• Implement an Interoperability Framework, within which the deliverables from each of Planet’s sub-projects can be seamlessly integrated with each other in a distributed service network
• Undertake Dissemination and Take-up Activities, to ensure the widest possible adoption of Planets deliverables among commercial tool and service providers as well as within the user community

The Information Society Technologies (IST) programme is part of the European Union's Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development. Beyond PLANETS, the IST programme includes a broad range of activities dealing with the use of information and communication technologies aiming at exploring new ways of exploiting the potential of European cultural heritage. These activities are run by the Learning and Cultural Heritage unit within the Information Society and Media Directorate General of the European Commission

For detailed information on the cultural heritage dimension of the Information Society Technologies R&D Programme go to: http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/digicult/index.html