E-ARK - European Archival Records and Knowledge Preservation

Our Story: KEEP SOLUTIONS

Hi everyone! My name is Miguel and I am the CEO of KEEP SOLUTIONS a small-medium sized enterprise that provides advanced services for information management and digital preservation. We focus on the patrimonial, scientific and cultural markets (e.g. universities, archives, libraries, museums).

For us, E-ARK represents an amazing opportunity to put into practice various long-standing ideas about systems’ integration and interoperability. Archives are among our most important clients, and it is heart-breaking for us to see archivists struggling to keep up with the overwhelming amount of documentation that is entrusted to them on a daily basis. It is our belief that the conventional acquisition process in place in most archives today does not cope well with the increasing volume of digital information.

We entered this consortium with the goal of showing the world that is possible to have high quality, easy to maintain, interoperable communication channels between producers and the long-term digital preservation-oriented archives. In the pursuit of that goal, E-ARK is quintessential. Not only does it define how the flow of information should happen between these two entities, but also, what the exchanged information should look like.

Our Story: The Austrian Institute of Technology

The Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) is Austria’s leading research and technology establishment and is a key player on the European research landscape.

All team members involved in the E-ARK project are part of the Digital Insight Lab (DIL) research group, which brings years of experience in the area of Digital Libraries, Digital Preservation, and Digital Repository Systems. AIT has been working for many years on big data solutions which allow for the efficient storage, process, analysis and access to large amounts of data in the context of cultural heritage institutions. We bring this specialist knowledge to E-ARK and aim to foster the adoption of innovative technologies and ensure that the solutions created meet the needs of our archival partners.  

European archives are facing a fundamental change due to an enormous growth of digital data in public organisations and institutions. Being part of E-ARK allows us to listen to our partners and understand the challenges they are currently facing. It is this domain specific knowledge which actually enables us to encounter new research topics and create innovative solutions.

Our archival partners show a lot of interest in the solutions that we are developing. This is great! However, sometimes our small research and development team is overwhelmed by the diversity of IT environments and specific requirements which entail numerous support actions to keep the infrastructure and services up and running in a near to production scenario.

It is a great motivation to know that E-ARK is addressing the real needs of the archives and that our solutions will contribute to their ability to address citizens’ requests to access archived data more easily.

Our Story: The Archives of the Republic of Slovenia

The 25th anniversary of the Slovenian independence referendum was an important milestone in the history of the Slovenian nation and an occasion that the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia wished to commemorate.

Having acquired tools and knowledge on how to manage and use geodata from within the E-ARK project, we decided to merge geodata from the Surveying and mapping authority of Slovenia and data from our State Election Commission database to present the referendum results in an interactive web application and thereby improve the user experience.

The E-ARK project has offered us the possibility to set up geodata specific tools that enable us to ingest, analyse, manage and present geodata in their digital form.

Our Story: Danish National Archive 

Small countries such as Denmark find it costly to develop the preservation tools that are required for the sustainability of archived information. In order to improve knowledge about the preservation of digital data, co-operation across nations can lead to common standards that benefit all.

The Danish National Archives has over 40 years of preserving databases and has preserved more than 4400 databases from governmental and public institutions. At the current rate we ingest 220 databases per year, and this year we will ingest 40+ terabyte of data, all of which complies with our preservation format SIARD-DK.

By participating in the E-ARK project, the Danish National Archive has had the opportunity to collaborate with other partners and draw on a wider pool of expertise and technologies to develop and test new ideas. There are many benefits from this collaboration. One of which has been the opportunity for the Danish National Archive to develop a migration tool that connects to live databases and migrates to preservation format. A key contribution of Danish National Archives has been to ensure that scalability issues and practical issues have been implemented in the E-ARK specifications and E-ARK tools. 

One aim of the E-ARK project is to resolve a technical and costly gap by providing tools and standards that will be able to migrate data from live milieus to preservation format.

Furthermore, the E-ARK project will provide tools that the Danish National Archive can use when users need access to the data and knowledge which we have preserved. The tools developed under the E-ARK project will have the most impact for the Danish National Archive and will improve daily operations. However, the knowledge and insights gained will also be very significant.