E-ARK: Harmonising pan-European archival processes to ensure continuous access to e-government records and information

There has been a widespread shift to electronic ways of conducting business that has transformed existing relationships between governments, governments and citizens, and governments and business. This move to electronic interactions is supported by new busi- ness systems that streamline and automate transactions, enable integration of information and service delivery and enhance collaboration between participants. Such changes in the way government business is carried out have significant implications for how public ad- ministrations document their activities and make that information available to both gov- ernment and citizens to aid future decision making and accountability. Because digital rec- ords are particularly vulnerable to technological obsolescence and media decay, ensuring future access to the information created by government is a challenging issue for all juris- dictions. This paper focus on the E-ARK project, a European endeavour to standardise and create tools for consistently transferring digital records between business systems and digi- tal archives. The E-ARK approach has the potential to simplify and make consistent diverse approaches to solving the issue of how to transfer information between the ICT systems in use in government, and the archives charged with the responsibility for ongoing and man- agement of the information considered to be of long-term significance.This work was co-funded by KEEP SOLUTIONS, LDA

SIP Creation on Relational Databases (Full Scale Pilot 1)

This report contains information gathered during the execution of E-ARK Pilot 1: SIP Creation on Relational Databases

Detailed Pilots Specification

The Electronic Archiving Service consists of a series of activities covered by software tools and manual workflow steps. These tools are currently partly in existence, some are being developed by E-ARK project, many more are to be added by developments of the digital preservation community in the future. The role of this report is to identify the most relevant scenarios for the E-ARK Service, define which scenario which level of activity is needed in order to bridge the gap of the currently existing solutions (e.g. integration, software development, interface definition

Documentation, Common Information and Short Overview of the E-ARK pilots

This report contains the common information and short overview of the pilots, along with references to the final version of the Pilot Definition Excel files and Pilot Documentation Packages

Recommended Practices and Final Public Report on Pilots

This report summarizes pilot activities, achievements and best practice recommendations using the following chapter structure: Chapter 1 - This introductory chapter. Chapter 2 - Planning and executing the E-ARK pilots Summary of all pilot related activities in the 3 years of the pilot, from planning to evaluation. Chapter 3 - Pilot overview A brief overview of the full-scale and additional pilots. Chapter 4 - Pilot report Summary of the pilot execution and results with recommended practices and further development recommendations. The chapter consists of the following sections for each full-scale pilot: Pilot scenario details Execution report Changes to previous plans Feedback report, and Recommended practices and lessons learnt. Chapter 4 ends with an overview of the external evaluations performed by non-EARK member organizations. Chapter 5 - Pilot evaluation Evaluation of the full-scale pilot against project objectives and success criteria. Chapter 6 - Referenced documents and web pages Appendix 1 – Extract from E-ARK Description of Wor

SIP Creation on relational databases (Pilot Definition: Pilot 1)

This technical note sets out the definition of E-ARK Pilot 1: SIP Creation on relational databases

Tutorial on Relational Database Preservation: Tutorial - iPRES 2016 - Swiss National Library, Bern

This 3-hour tutorial focuses on the practical problems in ingesting, preserving and reusing content maintained in relational databases. The tutorial is based on practical experiences from European national archives and provides an outlook into the future of database preservation based on the work undertaken in collaboration by the EC-funded E-ARK project1 and the Swiss Federal Archives2. This tutorial relates closely to the workshop: “Relational database preservation standards and tools” which provides hands-on experience on the SIARD database preservation format and appropriate software tools

Significant Properties Of Spreadsheets - iPRES 2019 Amsterdam

In this extended abstract, the Open Preservation Foundation’s Archives Interest Group reports on our ongoing investigation of significant properties of spreadsheets. Using the InSPECT methodology for investigating significant properties of electronic content, our goal is to get hands-on experience in investigating the significant properties of deposited spreadsheets by adding a Spreadsheet Testing Report to the InSPECT Testing Reports lore. An additional result of the AIG investigation is a Spreadsheet Complexity Analyser tool that extracts spreadsheet- specific properties and can be used to calculate the complexity of a spreadsheet based on the values of those properties