Welcome to the CASPAR Preservation User Community!

How can digital data still be used and understood in the future when systems, software, and everyday knowledge continues to change? This is the CASPAR challenge.

Among the last outcomes of the project we invite all of you to have a look at our Training Lectures, a collection of videos of talks and screen captures of software – all about digital preservation.

Moreover for anyone who wants to be kept up-to-dated with the progresses in the field of digital preservation, we set up a Digital Preservation group in Facebook… join us now!

Finally, don’t forget that all the software and the documentation developed during the project is available on SourceForge.

So, not the end of a project …. but the beginning of serious, effective digital preservation!

Video Presentations


Preserving Digital Information: The CASPAR Way. As digital information is becoming more ubiquitous and indispensable and at the same time extremely fragile, there is the need to provide tools and techniques for secure, reliable and cost-effective preservation of digitally encoded information for the indefinite future. In the video the project coordinator, David Giaretta, presents what the CASPAR project has to offer.


ESA-ESRIN: Preserving Digital Data within the Scientific Domain. This video presents what the Scientific testbed within the CASPAR project has been focusing on. In the video we hear from our partners at the European Space Agency, Luigi Fusco and Sergio Albani and also from Advanced Computer Systems, Fulvio Marelli, where they go into detail on what threats their data will face in the future and why that Scientific data needs to be preserved.


IRCAM: Preserving Digital Data for Musical Performance. This video describes the way in which IRCAM has been working to challenge the threats to their digitally recorded performance files. Jerome Barthelemy of IRCAM discusses the development of the MUSTICASPAR system and the way that within this system using CASPAR components can help preserve these recordings for future use.


CNRS/INA-GRM: Preserving Digital Data for Musical Performance. In this video Johann Holland of CNRS discusses the way in which CNRS and INA-GRM have been working together closely to challenge the threats that the data that they have collected has been facing and how together they are challenging these threats using the CASPAR system.


UNESCO: Preserving Digital Data within the Cultural Heritage Domain. This video describes the way in which UNESCO has been working to challenge the threats to their Digital Data. Mario Hernandez of UNESCO discusses in detail the Data that has been collected by UNESCO for their Cultural Heritage Sites around the world and why this data needs to be preserved. This is followed by a presentation from Davide Palmisano of Asemantics in which he describes the processes used within CASPAR to help combat the threats to the data and preserve it for future use.


CASPAR videos: The Making Of. The behind the scenes documentary of the video production.

Digital information pervades modern civilization.Yet digital information is extremely vulnerable. A huge amount of precious digital information created and stored all over the world becomes inaccessible every few years at a very fast pace. Think of losing official records, a museum archive, irreplaceable scientific data, or even a collection of family photos, and we realize digital preservation is affecting us all.

This website serves the project CASPAR – Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval – an Integrated Project co-financed by the European Union within the Sixth Framework Programme (Priority IST-2005-2.5.10, “Access to and preservation of cultural and scientific resources”), that started on 1 April 2006.

CASPAR researched, implemented, and disseminated innovative solutions for digital preservation based on the OAIS reference model (ISO:14721:2003).

The website provides official project documentation and material relevant to digital preservation and related disciplines.

The CASPAR Preservation Workflow Diagram


CASPAR preservation workflow – click to view the animation

CASPAR methodological and technological solution:

  • is compliant to the OAIS Reference Model – the main standard of reference in digital preservation
  • is technology-neutral: the preservation environment could be implemented using any kind of emerging technology
  • adopts a distributed, asynchronous, loosely coupled architecture and each key component is self-contained and portable: it may be deployed without dependencies on different platform and framework
  • is domain independent: it could be applied with low additional effort to multiple domains/contexts.
  • preserves knowledge and intelligibility, not just the “bits”
  • guarantees the integrity and identity of the information preserved as well as the protection of digital rights