the Netherlands about digital information management. The Digital Preservation Testbed project was launched as part of this initiative. Based at the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands, it carried out research into the digital preservation techniques of migration, emulation, and XML, applying them to a range of digital materials such as text documents, spreadsheets, e-mail messages, and databases. Each technique was assessed for its technical effectiveness as a long- term preservation method, as well as for cost factors and other aspects. Reports of the project are available on the web. (This section is based on Beagrie (2003, p.28) and information available on the web site of the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands (www.digitaleduurzaamheid.nl/home.cfm)).
CEDARS (www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars)
CEDARS (CURL Examplars in Digital Archives) was a collaborative research project funded by JISC that ran from 1998 to 2002 and hosted at the Universities of Leeds, Oxford and Cambridge. It is included here because it was ‘an important test-bed for digital preservation within research libraries in the higher educa- tion sector’ (Beagrie, 2001, p.219). Its aim was to provide guidance to others in the sector about best practice for digital preservation. Among its outcomes are a preservation metadata schema and an archiving demonstrator project based on OAIS. Reports generated by the project are available from its web site. Some of the activities of CEDARS are noted in Chapter 5. The significance of CEDARS for digital preservation lies in its reports (available on the CEDARS web site) and its development of a prototype distributed archiving system. (This section is based on Beagrie (2001) and the CEDARS site (www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars)).
Sectoral alliances
JISC (www.jisc.ac.uk)JISC (the UK Joint Information Systems Committee) represents over 700 insti- tutions in the UK higher and further education sector. Its mission is to promote the use of ICT in that sector. It has energetically pursued digital preservation activities through collaborations such as the AHDS, CEDARS, and CAMiLEON (all of which are referred to elsewhere in this chapter).
Beagrie’s description of JISC’s Continuing Access and Digital Preservation Strategy (one of the finalists in the Pilgrim Trust’s inaugural Digital Preserva- tion Award), notes that JISC has three major objectives in its digital preservation activities:
• ‘establish best practice and guidelines for digital preservation and to dissem- inate them’ – here a major outcome has been the publication of Preservation Management of Digital Materials: A Handbook (Jones and Beagrie, 2001)
• ‘generate support and collaborative funding from, and promote inter- working with, agencies worldwide’ – the DPC is the principal outcome of this objective
• ‘develop a long-term digital preservation strategy for digital materials of rele- vance to Higher and Further Education in the UK’ – the major outcome is JISC’s Continuing Access and Digital Preservation Strategy and implemen- tation plan (Beagrie, 2004).
JISC’s Continuing Access and Digital Preservation Strategy is wide-ranging. It includes the provision of a wide range of resources on its web site, for example internet resources, e-journals, e-prints, feasibility studies and risk assessments that recommend actions for specific categories of digital material of interest to JISC members. It lobbied successfully for a Digital Curation Centre (described above). Beagrie notes other JISC achievements in progressing digital preserva- tion in the UK:
• Advocacy and funding, for example over £6 million in funding has been secured over the next three years, representing a substantial increase over previous funding
• Infrastructure, most notably the Digital Curation Centre
178 Digital Preservation Initiatives and Collaborations
• Supporting a ‘life-cycle’ approach to the management of digital resources
• Scoping studies: an example is the 2003 Feasibility and Requirements Study on Preservation of E-Prints: Report Commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)(James et al., 2003).
• Partnerships, for example with DPC, and the UK Web Archiving Consortium (Beagrie, 2004).
JISC is significant because it has been an important catalyst for digital preser- vation in the UK, not only in the higher and further education sector, but also more widely in the UK and internationally. (This section is based on Beagrie (2004) and on the JISC web site (www.jisc.ac.uk).)
Conclusion
The intention in describing this selection of digital preservation programmes and initiatives is to illustrate the range and nature of current digital preserva- tion activities, and to emphasize their increasingly collaborative nature. They may, perhaps, prompt the reader to reflect on digital preservation activities, and in doing so, to derive some value from them. Many other activities could have been included, such as those listed in the UNESCO Guidelines(UNESCO, 2003, pp.68–69):
• The Austrian On-Line Archive (AOLA), an archive of snapshots of Austrian web space (www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~aola/)
• The Academic Research in the Netherlands Online (ARNO) which links the document servers of three Dutch universities to keep their digital academic output accessible (www.uba.uva.nl/en/projects/arno/)
• The Australian Digital Theses Project, a distributed database of digital versions of theses produced by postgraduate research students at the partic- ipating institutions (adt.caul.edu.au/)
• The Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM), a collaboration between the University of Oxford, the University of London and AHDS, a permanent electronic archive of European medieval polyphonic music (www.diamm.ac.uk/)
• the European Visual Archive (EVA), providing easy and preserved access to the integrated collections and information held in European archives (www.eva-eu.org/).
A useful starting point to locate other digital preservation services and initia- tives is the erpaDirectory, available online from the ERPANET web site (www.
erpanet.org). Descriptions of other digital preservation services and initiatives are found in the case studies in the Appendix of this book, which include descrip- tions of activities at the National Library of Australia (PANDORA and PADI), VERS at the Public Record Office Victoria, the National Archives of Australia, and the Department of Family and Community Services.
The reader should be aware that these descriptions are of activities up to the end of 2004. Given the rapid rate of progress in the field of digital preservation, frequent reference to the web sites of these programmes and initiatives, and to sources such as the PADI portal, is recommended to update knowledge of each of them.
1111 2 3 4 51 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 211 3 4 5 6 71 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45 46 47 48 49 50111
Conclusion 179