Enterprise Content Management and the Records Continuum Model as strategies for long-term preservation of digital information

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 159-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Proscovia Svärd
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Proscovia Svärd

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the long-term preservation challenges that the Swedish private archives are faced with. In as much as they offer a complement to the public archives and hence offer a nuanced national narrative, they lack both financial and human resources to effectively deal with the digital information management environment. Design/methodology/approach Participatory Action Research (PAR) was used to identify the challenges of long-term preservation together with the six private archives institutions that were involved in the collaboration. The collaboration was financially facilitated by the Södertörn University. PAR is defined as a systematic investigation, with the collaboration of those affected by the issue being studied, for the purposes of education and taking action or effecting social change. What is distinctive of PAR is the active involvement of people whose lives are affected by the phenomenon under study. Findings The private archival institutions face long-term preservation challenges such as lack of a digital repository that would facilitate the capture, organization and management of digital records that are of different formats and in a dispersed environment. There are no stringent legal requirements to facilitate the creation and management of the records in a standardized way and the institutions fear that imposing such requirements might deter their clients from depositing archival materials with them. The institutions will also need to espouse the business-oriented archival descriptions where private organizations are concerned to identify relevant archival materials and to promote participatory archival descriptions that would allow the creators to tag their records with metadata. Digital information requires a proactive approach, that is, planning for the long-term preservation of the information before it is created. Private archives need to invest in education packages that will facilitate their clientele’s understanding of the challenges of digital long-term preservation. Research limitations/implications The findings cannot be generalized to all private archival institutions, as it was only six institutions that participated, but the issues discussed are relevant to most archival institutions. Practical implications A lot of research has been carried out in the area of long-term preservation, but researchers have not paid enough attention to the woes of the private archives. To sustain a nuanced national narrative, the private archives need all the support to be able to live up to their mission of preserving archives of the private sector that are not captured by the public archival institutions. This is important in a pluralistic society such as Sweden. Highlighting the challenges might enable the institutions to work towards finding common challenges. Social implications The private archives are part of Sweden’s national heritage. Their preservation matters to the society as a whole and to enhancing the voices of the underrepresented. Originality/value The literature review revealed that not much research has paid attention to the challenges being faced by the private archives. This paper, therefore, contributes to this knowledge gap.


2009 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 580-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph JaJa ◽  
Sangchul Song

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Albani ◽  
David Giaretta

ESA-ESRIN, the European Space Agency Centre for Earth Observation (EO), is the largest European EO data provider and operates as the reference European centre for EO payload data exploitation. EO Space Missions provide global coverage of the Earth across both space and time generating on a routine continuous basis huge amounts of data (from a variety of sensors) that need to be acquired, processed, elaborated, appraised and archived by dedicated systems. Long-term Preservation of these data and of the ability to discover, access and process them is a fundamental issue and a major challenge at programmatic, technological and operational levels.Moreover these data are essential for scientists needing broad series of data covering long time periods and from many sources. They are used for many types of investigations including ones of international importance such as the study of the Global Change and the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) Program. Therefore it is of primary importance not only to guarantee easy accessibility of historical data but also to ensure users are able to understand and use them; in fact data interpretation can be even more complicated given the fact that scientists may not have (or may not have access to) the right knowledge to interpret these data correctly.To satisfy these requirements, the European Space Agency (ESA), in addition to other internal initiatives, is participating in several EU-funded projects such as CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic, and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval), which is building a framework to support the end-to-end preservation lifecycle for digital information, based on the OAIS reference model, with a strong focus on the preservation of the knowledge associated with data.In the CASPAR Project ESA plays the role of both user and infrastructure provider for one of the scientific testbeds, putting into effect dedicated scenarios with the aim of validating the CASPAR solutions in the Earth Science domain. The other testbeds are in the domains of Cultural Heritage and of Contemporary Performing Arts; together they provide a severe test of preservation tools and techniques.In the context of the current ESA overall strategies carried out in collaboration with European EO data owners/providers, entities and institutions which have the objective of guaranteeing long-term preservation of EO data and knowledge, this paper will focus on the ESA participation and contribution to the CASPAR Project, describing in detail the implementation of the ESA scientific testbed.


2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  

Recognizing repeated concerns over the current state of knowledge about long-term digital preservation, the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress convened a workshop entitled “Research Challenges in Digital Archiving and Long-term Preservation” in April 2002. The main goals of the workshop were to identify the research challenges in digital archiving and long-term preservation; set priorities for research based on input from stakeholders; and propose mechanisms that could build a community of researchers and foster cross-fertilization among research projects. The workshop consisted of plenary presentations and discussions of the various challenges in digital archiving as well as small group sessions to define and set priorities for research. It also provided an opportunity for experts in computer science, mass storage systems, archival science, digital libraries, and information management to discuss obstacles to preserving digital information with government managers and other stakeholders. This report presents a summary of the workshop discussions and recommendations for future research projects.


2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiazhen Liu ◽  
Peng Du

PurposeThe purpose of this paper to describe the research work on the long‐term preservation of Chinese digital information funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) since 2001.Design/methodology/approachThe paper provides an overview, in text and figures, of ways in which e‐documents originating in China, in now obsolete formats, can be made readable again. Also, results of a recent survey of electronic records management in government and corporations are given.FindingsThe lifecycle management gap with respect to electronic records is highlighted and the main factors that restrict the Chinese anti‐disaster data backup plan are analysed. It is suggested that the data backup centre which can be accepted by small medium enterprises should be the e‐government disaster recovery centre for local government.Originality/valueAll the research results are useful for those who need to understand the long‐term preservation of Chinese digital information and electronic records management.


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