“Just solve the problem” month begins

Today is the start of a month which some digital preservationists have declared “Just Solve the Problem” month. I’ve already expressed a mixture of skepticism and hope for this; throwing resources pell-mell at a computer problem rarely works, but some good is bound to come of the effort. We will not come out of November with “the problem” solved, but there will be new resources, such as this page of links to format information. (This blog is included in the list.)

I’m working on a list of plain text formats, expanding on my earlier post on the subject. This will appear on garymcgath.com, hopefully within the next week. Also, I’ve started a page on the wiki on tools, with a relevant subset of the list on my own site, restricted to locally runnable applications.

Between this and the CURATEcamp hackathon on November 16, lots of interesting stuff is happening in preservation this month.