• 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.

Preservation Planning
The selection of preservation strategy is one of the core areas in digital preservation endeavours. Heterogeneous content, complex preservation requirements and goals, and untested tools make the selection of a preservation strategy very difficult. The Planets Preservation Planning Approach provides a way to make informed and accountable decisions on which preservation strategy to implement in order to most suitably preserve digital objects for a given preservation context. It allows the explicit definition of requirements and goals and offers a systematic way to evaluate preservation strategies.
PLATO - Preservation Planning Tool support

Archiving System for Small Instiutions
Reseach on the requirements and research issues for fully-automated archiving systems to be used in environments where little professional knowhow and awareness on digital preservation issues is available, such as small instituions, SOHO and personal archiving settings. Development of a system that hides the technical complexity of digital preservation challenges.
HOPPLA - Archiving System for Small Instiutions

A Showcase for Digital Preservation
The Time Capsule demonstrates general Digital Preservation challenges and solutions. One of the big goals is to show how data can be preserved, furthermore, how the data can be stored or migrated. The Time Capsule consists of several source objects metadata and file format standards, as well as encodings, file systems, data carriers, and migration plans.
Time Capsule - A Showcase for Digital Preservation

Preservation Characterisation - Emerging Characterisation Technologies
In this work-package we investigate emerging technologies from three perspectives. First, it will evaluate the possible application of technologies to uncover relationships between preserved content objects in order to improve access and understanding of their context. Second, it will examine challenges that arise in the area of digital arts. This will include identifying enhanced characterisation methods as well as identifying key elements of the research agenda for future preservation work in this evolving area. Third, it will investigate how the characteristics of digital objects and file formats can be improved to facilitate long-term access. This will focus particularly on Office formats, which pose complex preservation challenges, and are typically the most common format type present in archival collections.

Training Events
Planets is hosting a series of 5 three-day training events in different European contries. The events explore the need to preserve digital content, the action that needs to be taken and the Planets approach to addressing these issues. The first day of the event focuses on the challenges of digital preservation and introduces the Planets tools and services.
Plato events, Planets events

Project Members: Stephan Strodl, Christoph Becker, Hannes Kulovits, Michael Kraxner, Mark Guttenbrunner, Natascha Surnic, Petar Petrov, Michael Greifeneder, Rudolf Mayer, Tom Lidy, Andreas Rauber

Project website: PLANETS