Projects (english)

Digital Heritage: Video art in Germany from 1963 to the present
It has been known for some time that electronic data carriers such as the magnetic tape of video art pieces degenerates with time. Museums and collections all over the world are confronted with the same dilemma, but besides maintaining a status quo, in Germany virtually nothing concrete has been undertaken to remedy this situation. «40yearsvideoart.de» has developed an agenda to promote and mediate specific competencies with regard to the history of video art in Germany.
This initiative project, following an idea by Wulf Herzogenrath, is financed by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (Federal Cultural Foundation) and organized by five leading art institutions in Germany: ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (head of project) and the K21/Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf (official project carrier) in co-operation with the partners Kunsthalle Bremen, Lenbachhaus Munich and Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig.

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ARCHE

ArchiveLaser Project: Accurate long-term storage of analog originals and digital data with laser technology on color microfilm
Laser recording technology of digital data on color microfilm offers new perspectives in accurate and safe long-term storage. It will outperform existing storage and preservation methods. By the development of a novel laser recording system – the so called ArchiveLaser – the user can benefit from a unique tool for the preservation of analog originals and digital data of any kind. By embedding the ArchiveLaser technology in a versatile workflow, the digital and analog world is combined into a perfect long-term storage concept.

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Austrian On-Line Archive
"The Austrian On-Line Archive (AOLA) is a cooperation between the Austrian National Library and the Department of Software Technology of the Vienna University of Technology with the goal to make periodical snapshots of the Austrian web space. In an amendment to the Austrian Deposit Law passed in July 2000 off-line electronic media such as CD-ROMs were included in deposit regulations which are to be collected by the Austrian National Libary. Furthermore, as part of this amendment a pilot study addressing the collections and archiving of on-line documents was conceived. Preparations for the pilot-study commenced in 1999, with the first phase having started officially in 2001. [...] The AOLA project follows a harvesting approach, trying to download the Austrian web space. While doing so, it only archives files that are allowed to be indexed by automatic crawlers by their respective authors, strictly obeying robot exclusion files."

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ArchiSafe

2004/12

2007/12

Within the framework of the project "ArchiSafe (long-term archival storage)" (Langzeitarchivierung) the basic principles of an economic and scaleable electronic archival solution are to be defined and implemented in the form of a pilot system. Thus the project is intentionally linked to the results of the project "ArchiSig" which was promoted in 2003 with public funds of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour in which basic principles of legally-secure electronic archival storage were worked out.
Subsequent to approval of the departments, "ArchiSafe" will be supported and promoted financially in the e-Government-Initiative of the Federal German Government's "BundOnline 2005" (Federal Government Online 2005), as an "Einer-für-Alle" (One-for-all) (EfA) service.

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ArchiSig

2001/07

2003/12

Conclusive and secure long-term archiving of digitally signed documents
The project homepage describes the aims of the project in the following way:
"In the 'ArchiSig' project, archiving concepts and technologies are taken up and extended in a way that will allow secure and conclusive long-term archiving of digitally generated and signed data for 30 years or more. This involves the development of system architectures with new technical components and organizational concepts to guarantee the security of digital signatures. The solutions have to be practical, costeffective and in accordance to legislation in order to allow their deployment in various areas of the society.
The applicability of the concepts will be proved by the implementation and evaluation of a prototype in the Heidelberg University Medical Center and in other health care institutions, by comparative analyses in the public administration and the administration of justice of the federal state Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) as well as by expert's reports on the basis of fictitious legal cases."

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Archival storage of the administrations' digital documents

2002/01

2005/12

The project of the archives of the state of Bavaria promoted by the German Research Foundation aims the development of a model for transfer, long-term preservation and utilisation of the administrations' digital documents.

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Archiving and secondary use of qualitative interview data – a feasibility study

2003/09

2005/09

Acquisition and provision of quantitative research data as well as preparation and documentation of this data are principal tasks of the Central Archive for Empirical Social Research. A comparable institution, which systematically collects, archives, documents and provides qualitative data for secondary use on a national level does currently not exist in Germany. It is the sole responsibility of each researcher to take care of his/her own research material. In many cases data is kept in offices or at home, where it is generally not accessible to others and the long-term data preservation is uncertain.
On the basis of these considerations, the German Research Foundation (DFG) financed a cooperation project to explore the possibilities of providing an infrastructure for archiving qualitative data and to find out the needs of the scientific community for such an infrastructure.

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2005/01

2007/12

Archiving of websites and –projects of the German Bundestag
The German Bundestag archives the domain www.bundestag.de since January 2005.

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BABS1

2005/07

2007/06

The project aims to build up an organisational and technical infrastructure for long term preservation and access of digital resources out of the collections of the Bavarian State Library as a universal library with deposit rights, special collections and a digitisation center.

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 The objectives of the cooperative project between the BSB and the LRZ are the improvement of the organisational-technical infrastructure that has been developed as a pilot-system within the DFG-project “Long-Term preservation of Web Publications” with the aim to build a trustworthy and scalable digital archive as part of a national network for digital preservation, and the evaluation of the overall system BABS, the ‘Bibliothekarisches Archivierungs- und Bereitstellungssystem’ (System for Archiving and Access).
During the project experiences with innovative methods will be achieved in the fields of organisation, evaluation and improvement of trustworthy digital preservation. In accordance with nestor, the DNB and regional libraries, models for national cooperation will be tested.
Due to modified legal conditions (‘Erlass zur Abgabe Bayerischer Amtlicher Veröffentlichungen’ and ‘Bayerisches Pflichtstückegesetz’) and due to mass-digitisation projects the amount of objects to be archived is increasing rapidly. This raises the urgent question of the scalability of a digital archive. The scalability of BABS will be evaluated within the project, too.

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CHRONOS Archiving

2004/07

2006/11

Goal of the project CHRONOS Archiving is to archive contents of relational databases in the long term. Stored in an open archive format, consistently and independently from the original system, the archived data can easily be reimported to any version and any database. You can even search in or reimport data beyond borders of structural changes in tables or in semantics. Chronos Archiving automatically keeps track of any modifications. By using indexes, the search engine can access archived data very efficiently.
Reimports can be made using only selected data and in full compliance with relational dependencies.
By 2007 the project has led to a marketable product for digital long-term preservation of relational database systems, which is distributed, maintained and advanced by CSP GmbH & Co. KG. The product is already used by namable companies.

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Database of virtual art

2002/01

2005/12

The ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL ART is currently facing an extensive technological transformation: In the course of its relaunch the already established database and its team aim at evaluating and implementing cutting-edge web tools to align with the expanding needs of artists and scholars. New functionalities will be implemented step-by-step – as a work in progress – and will incorporate the invaluable input of a growing number of interested individuals: In return artists, scholars and the interested public will benefit not only from the extensive efforts in documentation, which are accomplished by the ADA since its beginnings, but also from an improved, collaborative tool that reflects on the multifarious aspects of media

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Database Supported Long-term Archiving of Digital Objects

2003/05

2005/06

Aim of this project are basics and techniques to achieve archiving systems which are more integrated, open, and flexible. Therefore, two major work packages are defined. On the one hand the potential of database systems for the implementation of archiving systems is analysed and on the other hand basic issues for modeling representation information (this kind of information is necessary for interpreting archived bitstreams) with the help of ontologies are explored. A framework for the classification of archiving scenarios provides the theoretical basis.

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digitalcraft.org

2003/01

Digital collection and archive of webdesign and games
Museums do not only have the purpose to present historical objects, they also fulfil a function as part of a cultural memory. In the society of information they find themselves in front of entirely new questions, regarding the culture of new media and internet. How, for instance, to collect objects that in principle will never reach the status of a completely finished work of art? Which criteria do you have to consider to decide the relevance of an object in terms of cultural history? How can digital objects be permanently stored in the face of the rapid innovation time of software and hardware?
Digitalcraft has confronted the problem of building up a digital collection and has tested different solutions. The three collection areas now contain a selection of recent web design, games and emulators as well as a historical online community.
digitalcraft.org was founded in 2003 as a spin-off of the "digitalcraft" section of the Museum for Applied Art in Frankfurt am Main (2000-2003). Since 2003, digitalcraft.org has been an independent cultural organization under the direction of Franziska Nori.

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Digital Archives(Federal Archives)

2006/01

2010/12

With the future system „Digital Archives“ the permanent custody and access of electronic records from agencies, created in Document Management Systems and Electronic Records Management Systems, will be possible. A complete "End-to-End-Process" was reviewed in a first testdrive. The learned lessons from this test were used for the building of a detailled catalogue of requirements for the future productive system.

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Digital Preservation for Libraries - DP4lib

2009/12

2011/11

The goal of the project Digital Preservation for Libraries (DP4lib) is to evaluate the possibilities for setting up a cooperative service-portfolio for long-term preservation, which meets heterogeneous requirements. Furthermore, a selective set of basic services will be implemented.
Lessons learned will be incorporated into a process model, which is to be used as a guideline for the implementation of long-term preservation.

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DISTARNET - A Distributed Archival Network

2004/04

A Distributed Archival Network

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Documentation and archiving of web ressources

2007/01

2008/12

Automation of archiving of web ressources

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Functional long-time-archiving

2010/06

The project homepage offers an overview on the project Funktionale Langzeitarchivierung. The research proposal and a report about first experiences are given.
The project aims to develop a functional model of emulation (emulator in a emulator system) of software environments, which shall finally enable a web-based access to the emulations.
Funktionale Langzeitarchivierung has become a part of the PLANETS-Project. Results will be subsumed in PLANETS.
Publications/Results
Functional long-term archiving of digital objects : development of a demonstration system for an internet usage of emulated runtime environments ( http://www.freidok.uni-freiburg.de/volltexte/6605/)

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Design phase for the setup of a data centre for the humanities (HDC). The goal of the design phase is to evaluate and establish the prerequisites to build such a centre, which will ensure that data from humanities research can be stored permanently and made available for reuse.

-> link to press release (only in German)

KEEP - Keeping Emulation Environments Portable

2009/02

2012/01

KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable) will develop an Emulation Access Platform to enable accurate rendering of both static and dynamic digital objects: text, sound, and image files; multimedia documents, websites, databases, videogames etc. The overall aim of the project is to facilitate universal access to our cultural heritage by developing flexible tools for accessing and storing a wide range of digital objects.

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2008/03

2009/02

The mission of the project was to develop a cooperative solution for long-term digital preservation of scientific primary data for centers of science and research.
The tasks of the KoLaWiss-Projects were:

• Identification of data produced different scientific facilities
• Classification of these data in categories (e.g. legal or technical)
• Concepts for the sharing of competencies and tasks
• Development of business-, costs- and accounting models

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Long term preservation of digital records

2005/10

2009/12

Digital Archive in the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg
The project aims at finding out how to implement the mandatory task of archiving digital material at a State Archive. Ingest and preparation for long term storage, preservation planning and future use of digital objects are to be conceived and practically carried out. Special attention is given to the integration of digitally-born with paper-based records.
In its first stage, the project has concentrated on long term storage. In summer 2006, a storage application was developed and several heterogenous objects were described with metadata and stored. The project team evaluated, migrated and eventually stored data from several state agency systems of Baden-Württemberg. A metadata catalogue has been published.

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Co-operative development of a long-term digital information archive - KOPAL

2004/01

2007/12

Aim of the three years running project is a practical trial and implementation of a cooperatively created and run system for long-term preservation of digital resources. The project started in july 2004 and is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research “Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung” (BMBF). Led by the German National Library “Deutsche Nationalbibliothek” (DNB) and in cooperation with the „Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen“ (SUB), IBM Deutschland GmbH and the „Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen“ (GWDG) kopal develops jointly a durable solution for long-term preservation of digital data. GWDG is in charge of the system's technical operation.

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Long-term Preservation of Digital Data concerning Cultural Property

2001/05

2007/12

This project wants to define standards and identify suppliers for the long-term preservation of cultural property.

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Long-term Preservation of Digital Media (Database Migration)

2001/11

2002/06

This project aims at the simplification of the preservation of media based digital publications. This goal is achieved by the detachment of the digital objects from their media which are in many cases already obsolete. Furthermore, the detached objects are integrated into a standard database system (here called as Database Migration). Experiments with technological representativ media and formats complete the conceptual considerations.

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Long Term Storage and Electronic Archiving (LeA)

2009/08

The aim of the project is to build a long-term storage for the electronic recordkeeping system and an electronic archive to preserve electronic records for an indefinite timescale.

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LOCKSS and KOPAL Infrastructure and Interoperability (LuKII)

2009/11

2010/08

Specifically this project proposes interoperability between the open-source elements of two existing archiving systems (LOCKSS and KOPAL) in order to combine cost-effective bitstream preservation with an established tool for usability maintenance and format migration.

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Co-operative digital long-term preservation of pedagogical e-resources in the framework of kopal

2008/12

2011/12

Aim of the project is to safeguard long-term accessibility of archive worthy material with professional reference to educational science. It is envisioned to establish the DIPF as a specialist aggregator for the collection and delivery of internet publications to the German National Library according to the legal copyright deposit. In the run of the project procession scenarios for long-term preservation will be developed as well as a good-practise-model for subsequent use by further disciplines.

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MONARCH

1995/05

2010/08

The "Multimedia Online Archiv Chemnitz" (MONARCH) is the institutional repository of the Technische Universität Chemnitz. Beside the access to the archived ressources, this website offers some information about the archive (technical background, institutional policy etc.).

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Sustainability of Linguistic Data

2006/01

2008/12

- resources acquired in long-term projects situated in three Collaborative Research Centres have to be converted in either one or multiple formats to be sustainably usable by researchers and applications
- providing unified methods of accessing heterogeneous data acquired in different linguistic projects
- development general methodologies and rules of best practice will be developed.

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PHAIDRA

2007/01

2010/12

Permanent Hosting, Archiving and Indexing of Digital Resources and Assets

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Pilot project long-time archiving

2006/09

2009/04

In several departments at the ETH Zurich digital measuring data (primary data) are collected and electronic evaluations (secondary data) generated. The ETH-Bibliothek also provides access to numerous electronic media such as electronic journals, data bases and e-books. The long-lasting availability of the information is traditionally secured by the Library. Presently, ETH Zurich including the ETH-Bibliothek lack a comprehensive program for the long-term archiving of primary and secondary digital data.
In a first phase (September 2006 until May 2007) of the pilot project the feasibility and trustworthiness of digital data at the ETH Zurich were examined and a knowledge base for future decisions was created.
In the second phase (June 2007 until April 2009), two pilot software programs will be installed and compaired. The main goal of the second phase is to define the requirements for a digital long-term archiving system at the ETH Zurich and to determine the organizational as well as technical structures necessary for its implementation. The archiving system will be based on the OAIS-model (Reference Model for open Archival Information System), which is ISO standard 14721 for the referencing of all kinds of digital data within an archive. The OAIS model consists of different modules embedded within a larger organizational and structural project.
The possible transfer and implementation of resulting knowledge to other Swiss universities is an importance aspect of the project. Beyond that, cooperations on the national and international level with other digital long-term archiving projects exist, these include E-Helvetica, kopal, nestor, KOSTPROBE. This will allow the experiences made and the knowledge gained to be shared when applicable.

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Political Internet Archives

2004/09

2006/08

For the purpose of this project, which has been funded by the German Research Foundation, the archives of five political foundations in Germany have joined Forces. The project aims not only to create new Internet archives but also to develop exemplary procedures that can be adapted by others. In the process of optimising the electronic backup of political parties' Internet presence, all archives can rely on the long-term experience of the archive of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which heads the project.
The project has ended in the determined period. Archives involved will continue to operate the preservation of the relevant websites beyond the founded period. The co-ordination of these work is resumed in an informal way.

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PREFORMA, PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives, is a new Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project started on January 1st, 2014, and co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme. Aim of the project is to address the challenge of implementing good quality standardised file formats for preserving data content in the long term. The main objective is to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity tests of files to be ingested into archives.

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Press Kit 20th Century

2004/05

2007/7

The project aims to digitize the historical press cuttings archives (period before 1949) of the HWWA and the Kiel Institute for World Economics (now both part of the ZBW) and to present them online in open access.

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Probado

2006/02

2011/03

Development of tools for the prototypic operation of a service for the automatic indexing, storage and provisioning of non-textual documents
The utilisation of complex documents with more than just text content is gaining more and more relevance. However, today’s digital libraries do not support this data optimally, since they assume that documents can be described by text. The goal of Probado is to develop, set up and integrate into the publication chain a service for non-textual documents in scientific libraries. A special interest will be put on the semi-automatic indexing of documents, i.e. the enrichment with metadata. For referencing the non-textual documents, these will be made citeable through the use of unique identifiers. Probado provides innovative methods for queries and presentation of results. The areas of applications are found in the music, 3D graphics, and multimedia learning units sectors.

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Psychological Data Repository (PsychData)

2002/08

2007/08

The goal of PsychData ist to preserve primary data generated by psychological research in a digital repository. The lasting accessibilty of stored data sets is ensured by detailed documentation and utilisation of non-proprietary formats. Data sets can be obtained directly from the repository. Our aim is to simplify storage and dissemination in the scientific community while ensuring interpretability. PsychData is ZPID's contribution to researchers and students providing a customer-oriented and integrated system which can aid with documenation and archiving tasks requested by the psychological associations and the scientific community in general.

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QualiService

2003/01

2005/01

Establishing a Service Center for Qualitative Data

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Qucosa

2008/04

2012/03

Quality Content of Saxony
Aim of the project is the development of a central technical and organisational infrastructure for a saxon document server.

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Retrospective digitising of historical press articles ...

2004/05

2006/05

 ... from the time of approx. 1900 to 1930 on paper, roll film and microfiche, kept in the archives of the Hamburg Institute of International Economics
Development of a data base with internet access

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SCIence Data Infrastructure for Preservation - with focus on Earth Science

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SHAMAN

2008/03

2012/02

Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent ArchiviNg
The goal of SHAMAN is the development of a prototype for the grid-based interaction of long-term archival systems by investigating and developing a long-term next generation digital preservation framework. The project will create a framework and application development environment, enabling the creation of test-beds of digital preservation that support infrastructures and services.

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Swiss Federal Archive: Long-term Preservation of Structured Data

2003/03

Project description of the long-term preservation of structured data at the Swiss Federal Archive.

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2004/08

2007/03

Legally Secure Transformations of Signed Documents
Based on use cases of the application domains "public administration", "health care", and "notaries" the project will
• analyze problems as well as legal and technical requirements,
• develop proposals for the future design of pertinent law,
• develop both concepts and concrete solutions for the practice,
• implement prototypes,
• evaluate prototypes and findings by means of tests and a simulation study.

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