Chris Rusbridge on significant properties

I've been a fan of Chris Rusbridge for a while now, increasingly so as I delved into the work he's been involved in previously, not least (as he mentions in his latest post) CEDARS. I was thinking along the same lines in terms of the need to identify what's important about a digital resource before you settle on a strategy for "sustaining" it (ideally before you build it, actually), and then I came across the work they did on "significant properties". Clearly the properties for the sorts of data and file-based assets that digital curators typically deal with (not to mention the context and purpose of their work) will often be different from the properties that a museum cherishes in their digital investments, but the framework that CEDARS developed is a great starting point for me.
CR has just blogged about this topic again, in the run-up to a JISC workshop that I'll unfortunately miss next week.

PLANETS in alignment?

Thanks to my co-stude at Leicester, Alex Whitfield, who drew this project to my attention (the British Library, where Alex works). From the "About" page of the site:

Planets will deliver:

• 
  Preservation Planning services that empower organisations to define, evaluate, and execute preservation
  
• Methodologies, tools and services for the Characterisation of digital objects
  
• Innovative solutions for Preservation Actions tools which will transform and emulate obsolete digital assets
  
• An Interoperability Framework to seamlessly integrate tools and services in a distributed service network
  
• A Testbed to provide a consistent and coherent evidence-base for the objective evaluation of different protocols, tools, services and complete preservation plans
  
• A comprehensive Dissemination and Takeup program to ensure vendor adoption and effective user training.