ID: 119

SORENSEN, Jan Dalsten

Curriculum

Jan Dalsten Sørensen holds an MA in History from the University of Aarhus. He is Head of Digital Preservation at the Danish National Archives, where he has been employed since 1999. He has been deeply involved with the development of methods and regulations for digital preservation and has written several presentations and articles about the work of the Danish National Archives in the field of digital preservation.

Title:	From stand-alone preservation to cross-institutional cooperation
Brief summary:	The amount of born-digital and digitized material at the Danish National Archives is growing rapidly. To ensure long-term preservation of the digital collections, three major cultural heritage institutions in Denmark have joined forces to develop and implement a bit-repository. This case will present this project and discuss the experiences so far.
Content:	The digital revolution presents all cultural heritage institutions that collect and preserve digital content with similar challenges. Even though the collections in e.g. archives and libraries are different and even though our pratices in terms of curation, registration and preservation strategy cannot be identical due to differences in legislation etc., the task of preserving the raw bits and bytes of digital material is in most respects the same. Therefore, three of the major cultural heritage institutions under the Ministry of Culture in Denmark decided to explore the possibilities for cross-institutional cooperation in the field of digital preservation. In an exploratory project, the three institutions designed the socalled “Bitrepository”. The Bitrepository has afterwards been developed and gradually implemented in the three institutions. This presentation is not meant to be a very technical presentation but will describe the Bitrepository from a managerial perspective.  It will examine the ideas behind the Bitrepository, describe our experiences and lessons learned in the development and implementation of the software. Furthermore, it will present the organizational structure of the bitrepository and outline the plans for the future.
Scientific contribution:	The presentation will demonstrate the practical implementation of the ideas behind Distributed Digital Preservation.
Keywords:	Digital preservation, bit repository, collaboration