The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is a not-for-profit membership organisation that exists to make our digital memory accessible tomorrow. We enable our members to deliver resilient long-term access to digital content and services, helping them to derive enduring value from digital collections and raising awareness of the attendant strategic, cultural and technological challenges they face. We achieve our aims through advocacy, workforce development, capacity-building and partnership. Our members represent a wide range of sectors including cultural heritage, government, banking, industry, broadcasting and higher education.

As a membership organisation, the DPC’s activities and interests are driven by the needs of our members. They have clearly identified a number of issues of pressing concern relating to interoperability, practical implementation of standards, and the preservation of specific data-types, including databases. As an example, the ability to transfer digital records between systems, particularly from EDRMS to long-term preservation systems, is a key issue raised by many DPC members.

As part of the E-ARK consortium, the DPC’s aims are twofold: to provide our members with direct access to the innovative tools and solutions developed by the project, and, using our well-established communications channels, to act as a multiplier for the outputs of the project. The E-ARK project is developing practical solutions to important issues faced by the preservation community and we hope to ensure these are well promoted and widely adopted.

The DPC brings to E-ARK a wide range of skills and experience relating multi-national digital preservation projects. This includes the delivery of training and communications outputs within a number of projects such as APARSEN, TIMBUS and 4C. As part of our core work we also provide training to our members through our roadshow series’ ‘Getting Started…’ and ‘Making Progress with Digital Preservation’, and through regular thematic briefing days. We publish in a variety formats on issues relating to digital preservation, most notably in our ‘Technology Watch’ report series and the Digital Preservation Handbook. We also administer the biannual Digital Preservation Awards, highlighting achievements in the field.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The National Archives of Estonia is a traditional public sector archive. This means that our role is to serve as the memory of the nation. In practice this means that we:

• preserve any type of information which is crucial to prove the identity and history of the nation and the rights of its citizens
• show how the nation lived and behaved to future generations
• preserve the legacy of notable people.

In addition, we also support scientific research by preserving crucial scientific and observation data ranging from medicine to astronomy.

Today much of the information is created in digital formats, so we also need to ensure that all of these formats can be transferred, preserved and reused. The data could be records in the e-healthcare information system, audio-visual recordings of Parliament sessions, the property ownership database or tweets of the president – but as long as they are needed by the state or citizens for longer periods we need to handle it. For example:

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Currently, the National Archives of Estonia hold about 500 TB of data. This includes both born-digital data such as databases, public sector records in PDF format, born-digital 3D movies, as well as digitised records such as early 20^th century Estonian movies digitised from nitrate media and digitised census records going back to the 16^th century. Obviously, as digitisation efforts continue and the amount of born-digital data grows, our digital holdings are expected to increase exponentially.

One special aspect of Estonia in general, and therefore also the national archives, is the “open by default” policy for data. The Estonian constitution defines that all data must be made available to the public unless there is a reason to close it (mostly for protecting sensitive personal data). This means that the National Archives of Estonia has put considerable effort into publishing all of its digital collections online through various search systems and also as (partially linked) Open Data.  http://www.ra.ee/vau/index.php/en //

Estonia is a small country with a population of 1.3 million. Consequently, the resources we can work with, both financially and in terms of staff working in the area of digital archiving, are limited. However, we too need to tackle the archiving of a wide variety of data formats, systems and environments for creating and managing digital information. This means that we need to develop relevant standards, establish workflows and develop tools and systems to implement it all. Over the last decade, we have realised that this is simply not possible without a strong and practical collaboration with the rest of Europe.

E-ARK offered an opportunity to participate with partners who had similar goals and to be part of a bigger network that could achieve more together than individually. Already during the lifetime of the E-ARK Project, we have experienced a huge increase in our capacity to reuse and implement tools and principles developed in other countries, all thanks to the agreement on core technical principles and archival specifications among the project’s partners.

Furthermore, the establishment of a strong consortium, and the E-ARK Advisory Board structure reaching beyond the project partners circle, have greatly improved our access to knowledge about new tools archival tools and therefore given us the chance to experiment with, test and improve existing tools for their validity and ability to meet the needs of digital archiving in the future.

The National Archives of Estonia has considerable knowledge about the archiving of records from Electronic Records Management Systems (ERMS), as well as a variety of methods and tools for accessing digital content online. As such, we have mainly contributed to the development of workflows, formats and tools for exporting electronic records from ERMSs in a controlled, secure and authentic way. With regard to tools, we have added the Estonian Universal Archiving Module (UAM) into the toolset of E-ARK.

Furthermore, we introduced the concept of “external access” meaning that digital content stored in our digital archives should not only be accessible from within the reading rooms or systems of the archives but should also be possible to be delivered to other institutional national or international systems or portals maintained by other institutions.

ES Solutions is an independent company that focuses on information management. The company assists organisations that need to have control over their information sets from an archive and storage perspective.

For more than a decade ES Solutions has worked with clients who experience a range of challenges with digital preservation and electronic archives. E-ARK allows us to contribute our expertise and skills and also broaden our network of skilled specialists.

We also support the idea of Open Source and we also intend to contribute our experience of working very closely with many different archivist organisations, such as the Swedish National Archive and the National Archive of Norway.

ES Solutions brings digital preservation expertise into the E-ARK project.

As well as both theoretical and practical experience from different assignments, we have also brought ESSArch into the project. ESSArch is an open source technical solution for an overall archival workflow. It is a practical implementation of OAIS and is installed at different organisations such as the Swedish National Archive and the National Archive of Norway.

We hope primarily to expand our expertise and skills and to improve ESSArch, our technical solution for digital long-term preservation. 

Second, we hope that the collaboration on the project will benefit existing clients as well as potential new ones. 

Finally, we appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the EC community, thereby ensuring that digital preservation will become less complex and easier for national archives and businesses to integrate into their respective operations.

IST is the engineering school of the Lisbon University. The members of the IST team involved in E-ARK are academics and researchers of the Computer Science and Engineering Department, with a strong connection to the IDSS R&D unity (http://idss.inesc-id.pt/ - a research unity of the INESC-ID: http://www.inesc-id.pt/).

This team has a very strong competency in many domains of information systems, therefore the participation in E-ARK is a very important opportunity to apply these competencies (mainly focused on requirements, design, development and assessment of IT solutions).

The IST team expects to be able to disseminate the E-ARK results in the main relevant scientific fora, such as the worldwide conferences iPRES, TPDL and JCDL, as also promoting them in Portugal in the archives community.

By the way, an interesting fact: do you know that the IST operates a nuclear reactor? Details at: https://tecnico.ulisboa.pt/en/about-tecnico/campus/tecnologico-e-nuclear/

The National Archives together with the regional state archives (“Statsarkivene” in Norwegian), form the National Archives Services of Norway (Arkivverket), headed by the Director General (Riksarkivaren).

The National Archives of Norway is an independent government authority under the Ministry of Culture. The authority of the Director General and the National Archives of Norway is vested in the Norwegian Archival Act of 1992.

The tasks of the National Archives and the regional state archives are to

• •preserve archive material from state institutions
• •make this material available for use to the public
• •control the work on records administration within the ministries, regional and county authorities
• •contribute to the preservation of private archives

The National Archives of Norway and the regional state archives are thereby both administration bodies and scientifically based institutions for culture preservation.

We have a several decade long tradition of administration and maintenance of the Norwegian archival standard for records management, the Noark standard. The current version is Noark-5. 

The process of long term preservation from public records management systems (Noark- certified systems) as it is today, includes the requirement that metadata is be transformed from the internal representation into Noark-XML code.

In addition, associated digital documentation has to be on a few specified file-formats, where PDF/A (variants) are the chosen file format for written text.

These activities are the responsibilities of the creator organisation before the material is sent to the National Archives.

The National Archives then validates the input before accepting the material. For registries (databases), the traditional approach has been to transform from databases into a locally developed XML-language called ADDML. 

Due to quality and authenticity issues regarding both of these above-mentioned approaches, we are evaluating additional measures, at least as a supplementary approach. This is one motive for joining the E-ARK project.

For the last few years we have been evaluating the SIARD-approach in different pilots and also been using it to some (limited) extent during production.

For the last couple of years, the National Archives has also required input according to (an implementation of) the OAIS-framework. Still being in the early stages of utilising OAIS, the need to get a deeper understanding of information packages, SIPs, DIPs, or AIPs and all the various design choices, is another motive for joining the E-ARK project. 

As a third motive, we have been using an earlier version of the ESSArch software from another partner in the E-ARK project, ES Solutions AB.

Having started up in 1999 as a traditional web company working largely for public sector clients, Magenta saw participating in E-ARK as a fantastic opportunity to bring their expertise about that client base to the project.

A small and versatile company with 20 employees, yet still the biggest deliverer of open source coding in Denmark, the team at Magenta built up knowledge of the public sector clients by working with them on, amongst other things, document management and integration projects.

As a result, Magenta has been able to transfer knowledge about many aspects of the sector required for E-ARK to be effective. Familiarity and understanding of the landscape and modus operandi of local and national government, as well as detailed business insights into their client base form the basis of the key contribution that Magenta made.

It was a natural progression for Magenta to work on archives and they came to E-ARK with an aspiration to see big improvements and effective investment in public archiving, as well as the opening up of standards in order to broaden market opportunities.