Join the Preservation Army
For the last 10 years the digital preservation community has painstakingly attempted to gather together information on digital file formats. This has led to the development of many registries, databases and silos of information. These efforts have been a great success in many communities but the number of people involved is still too few to achieve critical mass… until now.
In July of 2012, Jason Scott of the Archive Team decided that the problem was important enough to propose the idea of “Just Solve The Problem Month”, with the very first topic being file formats, both physical and digital.
The digital preservation community should see this as a call-to-arms on four accounts:
- We MUST join this army and provide the raw data on the different file formats (not just copy the data in PRONOM).
- We MUST make the first “Just Solve The Problem Month” a great success. It should build a bigger community of activists and lead to future months where we can solve more of the great digital problems.
- We MUST adopt and take care of ALL the resulting data and linked resources.
- We MUST demonstrate the real value of this effort to the army of people who contributed or allowed time for their workforce to contribute.


