Introducing Starling 🐦
Today we are writing to you from the road – Ben and Erin are on their way back from the Art Institute of Chicago, where they just wrapped up a project to help the Institute define a roadmap for strengthening digital preservation for their growing collection of time-based media art.
It doesn't matter if you are a small non-profit, a massive institution with a large endowment, or somewhere in between – even the most basic aspects of digital preservation are hard. We are excited to share the initial release of Small Data’s first free and open-source software. Starling aims to make digital preservation storage easier, more secure, and more affordable.
Starling harnesses the power of decentralized storage, so that instead of placing all of your trust (and money) with a cloud storage vendors' black-box, or building your own complex and expensive infrastructure – you can harness the power of community, and strong cryptography to accomplish digital preservation storage requirements.
Today marks the release of Starling as a free and open-source tool ready for testing in development environments. In the coming months as we enhance, improve, and iterate on the software, and prepare it for use in production, we would love to hear from you about how we can make it easier to use, and hope you will become part of the community!