Open Source Archival Repositories
and Preservation Systems

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Kevin Bradley
Curator of Oral History and Folklore and
Director of Sound Preservation at the National Library of Australia

The problem of digital preservation has captured the attention of collection managers all over the world. Predominately large institutions with archival responsibilities or well funded projects with research concerns have supported loose cooperative arrangements amongst themselves and driven the digital preservation agenda with remarkable results, addressing a range of very complex and increasingly convoluted problems. The needs of many archival institutions are more prosaic. They require reliable, sustainable, preservation standard, archival digital storage that is affordable and appropriate to their needs. The priority is for managing and preserving simple, discrete digital objects; images, audio, video and text.

There are a finite number of functions an archival digital repository must be able to perform. These are defined in the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) as; Data Management, Ingest, Access, Administration, Preservation Planning and Archival Storage. It would appear that affordable hardware and open source software exists to support many of these functions, but not completely, and not in a single form. The UNESCO Memory of the World Sub Committee on Technology (MoW SCoT), commissioned a report to test this hypothesis and identify development gaps, the resolution of which might be encouraged. The report was funded jointly by UNESCO MoW and the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR), and submitted to UNESCO in April 2007. This paper describes the reports findings and proposes a method for carrying it forward.

Kevin Bradley
Kevin is Curator of Oral History and Folklore and Director of Sound Preservation at the National Library of Australia.  He is a member of t he UNESCO Memory of the World Sub Committee on Technology (MoW SCoT), Vice Chair of the IASA Technical Committee and editor of TC04 Guidelines in the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects.  He worked from 2004 to 2006 as Sustainability Advisor for the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories and is President of the Australasian Sound Recordings Association (ASRA).