Advancing long-term digital preservation of scientific data
Generating research is not enough. If it is to benefit society, it needs to be safeguarded for the future. That is why digital preservation is so important. Since its launch in 2019, the EU-funded ARCHIVER project has sought to provide European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) research communities with reliable repository services for research data. Out of the five consortia selected in ARCHIVER’s search for digital archiving and data preservation specialists capable of delivering innovative EOSC-ready solutions, two have entered the final pilot stage. The two consortia – one led by London-based Arkivum and the other by Madrid-based LIBNOVA – had previously successfully completed both the design and prototyping phases of the project. Now in the pilot phase, they will be providing research-ready solutions for the long-term digital preservation of scientific data.
The Arkivum solution
“The third and final phase of the ARCHIVER project will address the pressing need for long-term sustainable digital preservation and access solutions for scientific data,” observes Arkivum’s chief technology officer and co-founder Dr Matthew Addis in a news item on the ‘EIN Presswire’ website. “Among our key areas of focus are: achieving economic sustainability with a solution that is cost-effective at scale when working with very large datasets; ensuring environmental sustainability by minimising the carbon footprint of the solution, and, of course, applying good practice in the digital preservation and archiving of research data, with the aim of guaranteeing long-term, sustainable access for the scientific community to these hugely valuable resources.” While the focus is on long-term archiving and preservation of petabyte-scale data sets, smaller organisations working on a terabyte scale can also benefit. “Arkivum’s ARCHIVER solution will now be applied to a broader range of use cases,” continues Dr Addis. “It is designed to be flexible – cloud-provider agnostic, but also suited to on-premises deployment – and responsive to the archiving needs of a wide range of organisations. Scalability and economies of scale have been a prime concern throughout the project, and smaller operations, maybe working with terabytes rather than petabytes, will also be able to benefit by becoming tenants of the Arkivum SaaS solution. Across the board, we are constantly mindful of the ever-growing need for long-term digital preservation services, of the ideology of open data, and of the imperative of ensuring data is FAIR, keeping digital assets Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.”
The LIBNOVA solution
The LIBNOVA-led consortium’s petabyte-scale digital preservation solution, LABDRIVE, is based on an advanced digital preservation platform called LIBSAFE. As described on the ARCHIVER website, the solution architecture consists of four areas: containers to “keep content accessible with several protocols, organized and protected;” dynamic insights to “help users when dealing with personal information, digital preservation and emissions reduction;” budgeting assistance; and a content gateway that “connects the platform with discovery solutions such as Invenio or Dataverse.” By combining multiple ICT technologies and business models in a hybrid cloud environment, the ARCHIVER (Archiving and Preservation for Research Environments) project aims to deliver end-to-end archival and preservation services that cover the full research life cycle for multiple research domains. The project ends in June 2022. For more information, please see: ARCHIVER project website
Keywords
ARCHIVER, digital preservation, data, research, archiving
