Achieving digital preservation and particularly long-term availability of cultural heritage data and research data is still a major research topic. Our main task is to develop and operate a Digital Preservation System (long-term archive) to provide permanent access to the results of scholarly research and to the outcome of digitization efforts from a wide variety of cultural heritage institutions. This involves the development of preservation policies and data ingest workflows.
The idea is to distinguish the domain of active research and the long-term preservation domain. In the active research domain, curation is the responsibility of the researcher or heritage institution, and in the long-term preservation domain, responsibility lies with the long-term archive. An important part of the work is focused on data preparation issues, particularly addition of descriptive, technical and administrative Metadata. A thorough look inside the transferred data stream to secure file integrity and authenticity is part of the work. File format validation is a prerequisite to decide on migration of obsolete file formats. The Digital Preservation System in use (EWIG) is designed to be a single, modular core pipeline of existing free and open-source software tools linked up by in-house developed data conduits.
EWIG ist jointly developed and operated by Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV) and Research and Competence Center Digitalization Berlin (digiS). The necessary large scale bit stream preservation facilities are provided in-house.
