www.casparpreserves.eu

How can digital data still be used and understood in the future when systems, software, and everyday knowledge continues to change? This is the CASPAR challenge.

Digital information innervates modern civilization. Yet digital information is extremely vulnerable. A huge amount of precious digital information created and stored all over the world becomes unaccessible every few years at a very fast pace. Think of losing official records, a museum archive, irreplaceable scientific data, or even a collection of family photos, and we realize digital preservation is affecting us all.

Project CASPAR - Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval - an Integrated Project co-financed by the European Union within the Sixth Framework Programme (Priority IST-2005-2.5.10, "Access to and preservation of cultural and scientific resources"), that started on 1 April 2006.

CASPAR will research, implement, and disseminate innovative solutions for digital preservation based on the OAIS reference model (ISO:14721:2003).

CASPAR methodological and technological solution:

• is compliant to the OAIS Reference Model - the main standard of reference in digital preservation
• is technology-neutral: the preservation environment could be implemented using any kind of emerging technology
• adopts a distributed, asynchronous, loosely coupled architecture and each key component is self-contained and portable: it may be deployed without dependencies on different platform and framework
• is domain independent: it could be applied with low additional effort to multiple domains/contexts.
• preserves knowledge and intelligibility, not just the “bits”
• guarantees the integrity and identity of the information preserved as well as the protection of digital rights

2008 » October 2008 » CASPAR_All Hands Meeting_Paris (25)