The project will impact on:

  • Research: advancing the state of the art (OAIS applications, virtualisation, etc..)
  • Standards: developing and extending standards in many areas
  • Policy developments: facilitating the understanding and widespread application of digital preservation
  • Industry: supporting emerging digital preservation systems and services

Contributions to standards
CASPAR is strategically focused on current and emerging standards and aims to incorporate them in the preservation process. Examples of the areas include:

  1. The evolution of the OAIS Reference Model
  2. Authenticity of Digital Information
  3. Extensions to the Object Storage Device (OSD) standard to support an implementation of the OAIS concepts
  4. Contribution to the definition of the national guidelines and recommendations for preservation
  5. Certification standard for trusted repositories
  6. Support the promotion of the ESA proposed SAFE15 archive format standards for all Earth Observation missions
  7. Contributions to AIP-type packaging techniques
  8. Contributions to OGC18 effort for the geospatial data
  9. Digital Libraries evolution on GRID (GGF, SRB) Persistent Archives GGFk
  10. Contribution to the MoReq19 guidelines with reference to preservation issues


Contribution to policy developments
CASPAR will supply the kind of tools and procedures which are called for by i2010 – A European Information Society for growth and employment  which promotes, ‘The Knowledge Society,’ a call for Europe to become the most dynamic and knowledge based economy in the world. In particular, CASPAR addresses the basic challenges identified for Preserving Digital Content in the document i2010, namely:

• Financial challenges: addressed by the Cost Modelling work in CASPAR

• Organisational challenges: addressed by CASPAR training and the CASPAR framework allowing the sharing of the effort of preservation.

• Technical challenges: CASPAR will advance our understanding of many of the fundamental issues of digital preservation; the components and framework should improve the cost-effectiveness of digital preservation efforts.
Risk assessment and related communication strategy
The risk associated with failing to preserve digital information is disastrous. The memory and expression of modern civilization is preserved in vulnerable digitally encoded objects. Failure to develop a sustainable framework and formulate a long term strategy to preserve this information will cost the global community generations of irreplaceable data.

For more information see the Project [Download not found] (pdf,1972KB).