Digital Preservation Europe (DPE)

Problem

Electronic resources are a central part of our cultural and intellectual heritage, but this material is at risk. Digital memory needs constant management, using new techniques and processes, to contain such risks as technological obsolescence. Risk begins before the digital record is created and continues for as long as the digital object needs to be retained. Digital preservation is too big an issue for individual institutions or even sectors to address independently. Concerted action at both national and international level is required. DigitalPreservationEurope, building on the earlier successful work of ERPANET, facilitates pooling of the complementary expertise that exists across the academic research, cultural, public administration and industry sectors in Europe.

Approach

DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) fosters collaboration and synergies between many existing national initiatives across the European Research Area. DPE addresses the need to improve coordination, cooperation and consistency in current activities to secure effective preservation of digital materials. DPE's project partners lead work to:

1. raise the profile of digital preservation;
2. promote the ability of Member States acting together to add value to digital preservation activities across Europe;
3. use cross-sectoral cooperation to avoid redundancy and duplication of effort;
4. ensure auditable and certificated standards for digital preservation processes are selected and introduced;
5. facilitate skills development through training packages;
6. enable relevant research coordination and exchange;
7. develop and promote a research agenda roadmap; and
8. help both citizens and specialist professionals recognise the central role that digital preservation plays in their lives and work

DPE's success will help to secure a shared knowledge base of the processes, synergy of activity, systems and techniques needed for the long-term management of digital material.

Procedure

DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) has three main objectives, each of which has one or more sub-goals.

1. To create a coherent platform for proactive cooperation, collaboration, exchange and dissemination of research results and experience in the preservation of digital objects.
   1. To identify and raise awareness of sources on the issues surrounding the curation and preservation of digital objects across the broad spectrum of national and regional cultural and scientific heritage activity in Europe.
   2. To contribute to the elimination of the duplication of effort of research activities by researchers at different institutions and to enable identification, collection and sharing of knowledge and expertise.
   3. To create a conduit between the research community and practitioner community that will foster the collaborative approaches to preservation needs.
   4. To stimulate further research on digital preservation in key areas and encourage the development of standards where gaps and opportunities have been identified this will include promoting and developing research agendas.
2. To increase prevalence of preservation services and their viability and accountability.
   1. To support the development of a European-wide approach to the audit and certification of digital repositories as an essential stage in creating content management and delivery services and to repository federation.
   2. To stimulate ICT companies and software developers to incorporate some of the curation and preservation thinking into newer generations of software.
   3. To relate the digital preservation research agenda more directly to the development of exploitable product opportunities and to develop links with the industrial sectors.
3. To improve awareness, skills and available resources.
   1. To examine core issues that will deliver essential guidelines, methods and tools to enable preservation action with European public and private sectors.
   2. To implement a suite of training seminars based on best practice and to identify where and what further practitioner training and staff development initiatives might be undertaken.

Consortium

Project Partners

• Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), University of Glasgow
• Vienna University of Technology (TUW)
• State and University Library (Statsbiblioteket) and National Media Archive, Aarhus (SB)
• Het Nationaal Archief (NANETH)
• Czech Republic National Library (NKP)
• General Directorate for Library Heritage and Cultural Institutes (MIBAC)
• Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale (FDR)
• Vilnius University Faculty of Communication (VUFC)
• FernUniversität in Hagen (FUH)

Project Homepage

Digital Preservation Europe

Contact

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias L. Hemmje