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Brief summary:
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The German Federal Archives has established a business model
for digital preservation and custody
in 2008. Since then the Archives has implemented a PreIngest-toolset,
which enables us i.e. to build SIPs out of databases, and a software-suite for the creation and management of the
AIPs. Currently we establish a digital-preservation-planning-tool.
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Content:
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The German Federal Archives
has long since taken
digital records into custody:
After the German reunification the Archives recieved electronic
materials, originating from
the government agencies
of the former German Democratic Republic. In 2006,
the aim of preserving both machine-readable data from the 1970ies to 1990ies and the
electronic records soon
expected then, led to the constitution of the ‘Digital Archives’ at the Federal Archives. At that time, the challenge was to create a business model for digital preservation
and custody, which has been established in 2008. But the Electronic
Document and Records Management Systems (EDRMS) were not introduced
in the government
agencies as speedily as had
been anticipated by the Federal Archives. Instead there were other digital object types, which had to be integrated in the system, notably big databases, digital media (pictures, movies, sounds) and
unstructured data (in shared
folder file systems).
In 2013 the Federal Archives implemented a PreIngest-toolset,
which enables us to build submission information packages (SIP)
out of unstructured data and databases.
For the creation and
management of the archival
information packages
(AIP) we use a software
suite, which includes a
consistent metadata management. Hence we establish
a tool for the digital preservation planning: Especially the wide range of formats the Digital Archives has to cope with presents a
challenge to digital preservation. Given that long-term access to each of these formats cannot be guaranteed our preservation policy implies the provision of a secure storage and the integrity of each record manifestation as well as the migration of records to new technical manifestations (primarily PDF/A and TIFF).
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