A European data archiving standard initiative for governments and contractors is being extended, with new funding from the European Commission.
The standard aims to make sure digital records are interoperable, open, transparent, legally compliant, and sustainably accessed.
The eArchiving Initiative started in October 2022 under a two-year funding model. At last week’s IT Press Tour in Istanbul, Turkey, IT Europa was told the project would be extended by another two years, up to 2026.
The overall aim is to “use the data from the past to support and predict the future” through common architectures, supported by open source archiving tools, standards and interoperability, and the supporting of connected archives,
The eArchiving Initiative has the support of specialist data consulting firms, global information system and data discovery technology players, and a number of countries’ national archives.
According to the Initiative, its archiving benchmarks and tools have been adopted by various government agencies and enterprises across Europe, the US, Australia, Latin America and Asia.
The modules that come as part of the standard cover data context, behaviours, rendering information, and structure, and consider data availability, usability, trustworthyness/authenticity, completeness, time proofing, findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability.
“All our tools are open source based on a freemium model, as many users may well need a contractor to come in and implement them, which is where many of our consortium members will become involved,” said Gregor Završnik (pictured), CEO of Geoarh, and a member of the EU Digital Archiving group.
The eArchiving Reference Architecture Version 2.0 was published this year, and an online version is available here:
https://kc.dlmforum.eu/earchiving-ra20/
The eArchiving Conformance Seal [https://seal.e-ark-foundation.eu/] is intended for digital archives, and associated solution and service providers, and is a sign of the quality of archiving, long term preservation, and data management they support.
