Summary

The Planets Project1 is developing services and technology to address core challenges in digital preservation. This article introduces the motivation for this work, describes the extensible technical architecture and places the Planets approach into the context of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. It also provides a scenario demonstrating Planets ’ usefulness in solving real-life digital preservation problems and an overview of the project’s progress to date. 1 Work presented in this paper is partially supported by European Community under the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme of the 6th FP for RTD- Project IST-033789. The authors are solely responsible for the content of this paper. It does not represent the opinion of the European Community, and the European Community is not responsible for any use that might be made of data appearing therein. The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. ISSN: 1746-8256 The IJDC is published by UKOLN at the University of Bath and is a publication of the Digital Curation Centre. Adam Farquhar & Helen Hockx-Yu 8