DPE - DigitalPreservationEurope
The Coordination Action DigitalPreservationEurope was launched in order to improve cooperation and consistency in current activities to secure effective preservation of digital materials. The project has lead work to raise the profile of digital preservation; to promote auditable and certificated standards for digital preservation processes; and to facilitate skills development through training.
- Project type: Coordination Action
- Start date: 1 April 2006
- Duration: 36 months
- EU funding: € 1 451 000
- Number of partners: 11
- Project coordinator: HATII, University of Glasgow, UK
- Contact: Prof. Seamus Ross
Project description
Proliferation of digital content has resulted in an increasingly urgent need for commercial organisations, the public sector and individual users to protect their digital resources from the risk of getting lost and to preserve their accessibility over time. Digital preservation being too big an issue for individual institutions or even sectors to address independently, concerted action at both national and international level is required.
The Coordination Action DigitalPreservationEurope was launched in order to improve cooperation and consistency in current activities to secure effective preservation of digital materials. To this end, the project has facilitated pooling of the complementary expertise that exists across the academic research, cultural institutions, public administrations and industry sectors in Europe.
More specifically, DPE's project partners have lead work to:
- raise the profile of digital preservation;
- ensure auditable and certificated standards for digital preservation processes are selected and introduced;
- facilitate skills development through training packages;
- enable relevant research coordination and exchange;
- develop and promote a research agenda roadmap;
- help both citizens and specialist professionals recognise the central role that digital preservation plays in their lives and work.
Results
- In conjunction with the UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC) DPE released the DRAMBORA toolkit and held tutorials to support its adoption. DRAMBORA facilitates internal audit by providing repository administrators with a means to assess their capabilities, identify their weaknesses, and recognise their strengths.
- A Planning Tool for Trusted Electronic Repositories (PLATTER) has been designed. It provides a basis for a digital repository to plan the development of its goals, objectives and performance targets over the course of its lifetime in a manner which will contribute to the repository establishing trusted status amongst its stakeholders.
- Within the work package 'Coordination of EU Repository Activities', DPE has designed a Registry of Digital Repositories in order to monitor and assess information on preservation policies and practices of organisations responsible for the long-term management of digital materials. Further, DPE has launched a service to issue unique identifiers for digital objects. Another result of this work is a guidance document for repository planners seeking to achieve trusted status, consistent with internationally accepted standards for repository management.
- Among the DPE publications, available form the project website, are a state of the art review on international competence centres for digital curation and preservation activities and expertise; a 'Market and Technology Trends Analysis' on needs and plans of main stakeholders and technological solutions available for digital preservation; a report on the legal framework on repository infrastructure impacting on cooperation across EU Member States; a 'Digital Preservation Research Roadmap' identifying core domains for preservation research; and a series of briefing papers providing concise overviews of key digital preservation and curation issues.
- DPE also has established training programmes on digital preservation, run several training courses and created an online training materials repository.