Copal long-term archiving

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The aim of the joint project kopal ( Ko o p erativer A TRUCTURE one L is angzeitarchivs digital information) of the structure of a cooperative developed and operated archive system to ensure the long-term availability of digital documents. In doing so, not only the physical preservation of the data should be guaranteed, but above all their future interpretability. kopal was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research from 2004 to 2007 .

Content and course of the project

Under the direction of the German National Library, the project partners are working together to develop a technical and organizational solution for long-term archiving. The technical implementation of the functionality is based on preliminary work carried out by the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) and IBM as a joint development project since 2000. The KB's eDepot, which has been in production for electronic resources since 2003, is based on IBM's own "Digital Information Archiving System - DIAS", the core of which is used for kopal after an adaptation. The further development of the system into a cooperatively operated system equipped with standardized interfaces will be taken over by IBM as part of kopal. The software developed by the project partners DNB and SUB Göttingen for feeding into the system and querying archived objects is published under an open source license (software library koLibRI - kopal Library for Retrieval and Ingest). The technical operation of the long-term archive is based at the data center partner GWDG.

For the archiving solution to be developed by kopal, integration into existing library systems and the reusability of the system by other cultural heritage institutions and other institutions that require long-term archiving is expressly desired. The project has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research since July 2004 with a volume of 4.2 million euros, making it the largest joint project for digital long-term archiving in Germany to date.

In contrast to other initiatives that are dedicated to archiving digital materials, kopal can be used for materials of all kinds and flexibly adapted to the respective conditions of use of the institutions. The SUB Göttingen and the German National Library currently use the archive system as clients . Various usage models have been developed for other interested parties.

Project partner

Project partners in the funding period are:

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