eArchiving Building Block: E-ARK3 Project

Under the umbrella of the E-ARK3 Project 20 partners are supporting the development of the CEF eArchiving Building Block. The eArchiving Building Block is a solution to long-term information assurance. It provides the specifications, reference software, training and service desk support for digital archiving. This benefits both the design of repositories as digital archiving and preservation systems and the enabling of business systems to send data to those repositories.

 eArchiving also provides a set of sample software components for several scenarios and business environments. With these components any organisation can develop its own institutional archiving and preservation ecosystem, or develop standardised workflows for delivering content from its business systems to external repositories. Using eArchiving guidelines guarantees that information will still be available and reusable for as long as it is required

The foundation of eArchiving is the set of Information Package specifications. These describe platform-independent formats for storing information assets as bulk data and metadata that remains authentic and understandable over the long-term. These specifications are based on the accumulated knowledge and experience of a large international community of researchers and practitioners. They are thus ideal for long-term information assurance, supporting:

• migrating data between generations of business information systems;
• transferring data to dedicated archival repositories;
• managing data in repositories concerning its long-term preservation;
• reusing data over the long-term, independently of the business systems.

The Archives of the Republic of Slovenia is one of the independent partners in the project and contributes in the following Activities:

• A2 Specification Management;
• A3 Sample Software, Compliance and Support Services;
• A5 User Engagement and Outreach.