- Posted 23-Nov-2020
Towards a sustainable ecosystem for long term digital preservation of cultural heritage
In 2017 nine national archives and museums from eight European countries completed a pre-commercial procurement to improve the quality of digital files that preserve our cultural heritage for the long-term future to prevent degeneration of data storage quality over time. The procurement resulted in worldwide adoption of the three resulting open standardised solutions that improve the capacity, accuracy and quality of digital preservation at a reduced cost.
The buyers group consisted of the following memory institutions: National Archives-Riksarkivet (SE), Sound and Image-Beeld en Geluid (NL), Royal Institute for art Patrimonium- KIK (BE), Greek Film Center (GR), Local Government Management Agency – LGMA (IE), Foundation Prussian Cultural Heritage (DE), Town Hall Girona (ES), Ministry of Culture–EVKM (EE), National Library – Kungliga Biltioteket (SE). The national archives (SE) acted as lead procurer of the buyers group.
Before starting the procurement, the buyers group consulted memory institutions worldwide to create tender specifications that reflect commonly shared requirements and use cases. They consulted also industry and researchers to learn about technological developments.
The buyers group achieved its goal to bring to the market open source products that enable reliable assessment and correction of the increasing amount of electronic collections to be archived. PREFORMA helped companies (including in particular SMEs) and foundations to bring to the market reliable, standardised conformance checker tools and to raise the interest of the community to keep on investing in extending the high quality tools. Since the project ended, not only memory institutions from the buyers group have adopted the tools. The open source tools had already been downloaded more than 70.000 times by memory institutions from over 150 countries: 60% from EU, 30% from US and 10% from the rest of the world.
Read the full story about how the PREFORMA buyers group joined forces and generated this worldwide impact on long term digital preservation of cultural heritage. Find out what are the innovative solutions that were created and where to download them.
Source: Digital Single Market News (https://bit.ly/2IUO03w)