A useful sneak preview of the PLATO preservation planning tool, something I’d heard about but not really understood how it might fit in to a practical digital preservation context.
PLATO is designed to help organisations identify, evaluate and select the best preservation methods for individual types of digital object. It is designed to enable experimentation on sample objects of the various strategies (migration, emulation etc.) and tools available (eg DROID). The experiments can then be uploaded into PLATO and stored for re-evaluation at a later point.
I’m not really sure how practical a tool this will prove to be (in its current state of development) in the local authority archive service. The bulk of digital records we can expect to receive might make the detailed utility analysis approach overly onerous to use, even selecting a small sample of records for planning purposes. Nevertheless, one to keep an eye on. There is a DPC Digital Preservation Planning event in London later in July which will give an opportunity to discuss and experiment with the tool in more detail.
Around the World in 80 Gigabytes 
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