ID: 131

AAS, kuldar; DELVE, Janet; BREDENBERG, Karin 

Curriculum

Kuldar Aas is the deputy director of the Digital Archives of the National Archives of Estonia. He is actively involved in developing national records management and cultural heritage metadata standards; creating requirements and guidelines for the ingest, description and preservation of national datasets and electronic records from EDRM systems. He has also played a leading role in developing the proactive digital preservation and access environment at NAE. He is a member of the Estonian semantic interoperability taskforce; was test site and work package lead in the EC-funded project PROTAGE (2007–2010); is task leader for Web 2.0 and LOD in the APEx project (2012 – 2015) and technical coordinator of the E-ARK project (2014 – 2017). His academic background is in information technology and he holds a Master’s degree (2004) from the University of Tartu.

 

Dr Janet Delve has a BSc in Mathematics (UCL), an MSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (UCL), a PhD in the History of Mathematics, and a BA in French (Southampton). She has been working in the Digital Humanities for over two decades, with expertise in data modelling, database management and data warehousing (Big Data). In the FP7-KEEP emulation project she undertook the primary research and then developed the conceptual models behind the TOTEM technical environments registry database and the media transfer knowledge base. She co-led the JISC Preserving Complex Digital Objects (POCOS) project. She is the PSP CIP Pilot B E-ARK Co-ordinator, a member of the DPC Technology Watch Editorial Board, and the PREMIS Environment Working Group.

 

Karin Bredenberg graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering (programming C#) from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm 2006. She currently holds a position as an IT architect at the Swedish National Archives (SNA) where she has worked for the past eight years. Bredenberg’s main focus is on the creation of Swedish adaptions of international archival metadata standards. From 2008-2010, she worked with archivists from around the world on the development of EAC-CPF, a standard for encoding archival authority records. Bredenberg currently serves as member of the Society of American Archivists Schema Development Team as well as a member of the Society of American Archivists Technical Subcommittee on EAC and EAD and as a member of the PREMIS Editorial Committee. Since 2011, Bredenberg is part of the Swedish project E-archiving and registration, eARD, and in 2014 started participating as a standards specialist in the European project E-ARK.

Title:

Integrating records systems with digital archives – current status and way forward

Brief summary:

The presentation will present an overview of best practices in Europe and beyond around archiving born-digital records, preserving and reusing these in different jurisdictions and access scenarios.

The need and possibilities for further standardisation of these local practices is also discussed, focussing on practical issues and the way forward.

Content:

The main problem and cost item in current born-digital archiving is the lack of standardisation in the way source systems and digital repositories interact with each other.

As a result agencies across the world currently invest significantly into developing dedicated solutions for exporting their records and metadata from source systems, transfer to digital repositories and reuse. Unfortunately, these solutions cannot be reused in other jurisdictions.

To reduce the need for development and therefore cost of born-digital archiving, it is crucial to standardise the key components in the records archiving and reuse workflow:

export functionality for source systems;

formats for data submission, preservation and access (SIP, AIP and DIP formats)

interfaces for the access and reuse of archived records.

Achieving a critical level of technical standardisation would allow software providers to introduce native export and archiving functionality into their records management and information systems and therefore reduce significantly the cost of archiving for single organisations or jurisdictions.

To undertake such standardisation the European Commission has funded a project called E-ARK which aims towards analysing current best practices, provide relevant standards and implement these in a set of tools resulting in a reference implementation to showcase the full workflow from exporting records from source systems to reusing these in a variety of access scenarios, thus covering the full OAIS model functionality.

This presentation will present the first findings of the E-ARK project – a best practice review of current solutions in Europe and beyond; and present a set of practical aspects in standardisation based on the review. 

Scientific contribution:

The main outcomes of the work in the E-ARK project are a set of interoperability standards:

Records export requirements and relevant API (Application Programming Interface) descriptions;

Records preparation, quality control and transfer requirements;

Specifications for platform-independent SIP, AIP and DIP packages;

Specifications for multiple access interfaces covering a CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) profile for digital repositories and a data mining interface.

These standards will allow data creators and digital archives to be interoperable with each other with only minor modifications to their already available infrastructure.

The standards will also be implemented in a range of current tools allowing institutions which do not have all relevant components of the full archival workflow to take the tools they need and “plug” into their current infrastructure.

Keywords:

e-infrastructure, digital archives, data mining, OAIS, Big Data, born-digital records, pre-ingest, ingest, access, long-term preservation, CMIS, standardisation, MoReq