PRESERVATION OF DATA for the DIGITAL SOCIETY

The preservation of data for future re-use is a topic that is becoming increasingly important across a wide range of disciplines and is expected to become essential in the coming years as a cornerstone of the digital society. The strategy of this project is to combine the forces of several large-scale organizations to ensure that research work in this area is well coordinated and that the results are made available to a wide range of disciplines. The project aims to both document and verify techniques for the preservation of digital data with a strong focus on the continued ability to fully re-use the data, to raise awareness of the importance of this issue as widely as possible, to act as a forum for the interchange of information and best practices, and to develop a roadmap for the coming decade in order that digital preservation moves from being a challenge to a solution. Disciplines targeted range from Life Sciences to High Energy Physics – fields that have diverse needs in terms of data volume and lifetime as well as in access patterns and associated authentication and authorization requirements. Specific use cases that we wish to address include: the preservation of data for a small number of decades for educational outreach, preservation of data and the associated environment needed to maintain the ability to reanalyse it, as well as e-records of all kinds. The durations that we target are a small number of decades for the first two cases and up to a century or more for the latter. The goals can thus be summarised as: to consolidate and disseminate the current state of the art in this domain, including existing techniques and known challenges; to use a range of projects, networks and fora to further promote the fundamental necessity of providing solutions to an agreed set of use cases; and to develop a community-endorsed multi-disciplinary roadmap that clearly identifies the steps necessary to establish pilot services in this area.