Digital data plays a crucial role in Europe's digital transformation. When it comes to the public sector, moving from paper to digital benefits citizens and businesses, while promoting innovation and economic growth in the EU.
Traditionally, maintaining and storing official documents has been heavily reliant on paper. But over the last few years, public administrations, at both the local and national level, have realised the benefits of focusing their resources on digitally managed systems, saving both time and space.
Rotterdam, the Netherlands' second biggest city, is the latest European local authority to adopt CEF's (Connecting Europe Facility) eArchiving Building Block to manage its archives. The city's archive department, looking to improve its digital records' availability in compliance with European standards, spearheaded the project.
The project
Rotterdam's local government, which employs some 14,000 people, already had a digital archiving system in place. This particular project aimed to endow their existing digital archiving system with support for archiving databases.
The process included:
- setting a preservation plan for the new content
- selecting a preservation format
- creating a service that would enable Rotterdam's citizens to easily access the city's archives
The CEF eArchiving building block helped provide a strategy, a strong preservation format (SIARD), and an adequate solution for exporting information into the preservation format. This approach enabled the general public to access Rotterdam's digital archives without the need for technical expertise.
Implementing eArchiving as a solution involved several steps:
- Prepare the infrastructure for DBPTK enterprise
- Build test environment
- Package shortcut
- Test
- Build production environment
- Package shortcut
- Test
To design the necessary IT infrastructure, the city hired Keep Solutions, a Portugal-based company that specialises in providing advanced solutions for information management and digital preservation. Once everything was set up, Rotterdam's Local Government could use the eArchiving Building Block to:
- Create SIARD database files from databases like SQL and Oracle
- Manage the files
- Provide an interface to view the SIARD files
- Store the SIARD files in a different solution
CEF's eArchiving
At CEF, we believe essential information should be kept accessible and reusable for years to come, regardless of the system used to store it. The eArchiving Building Block provides core specifications, software, training, and knowledge to help people preserve and reuse information over the long term.
By following international standards and specifications for packaging digital information, organisations can transmit documents across borders for short, medium, and long-term storage (and subsequent access and reuse) regardless of the platform they use.
Having a standard set of open specifications for packaging and archiving digital information promotes high transparency and confidence among all participants in the information life cycle.
With eArchiving, digital archival systems can are deployed with reusable modular components that comply with various national legal backgrounds, which prevent the need to reinvent the wheel.
Final result
Today, anyone who uses the Internet can access information previously inaccessible in legacy databases. Making this information widely available to the public contributes to making the inner workings of Rotterdam's public administration more transparent and open.
According to Diederik van Velzen, a project manager at Rotterdam's local government, eArchiving complied with European standards and allowed them to stay on budget.
"We used much time selecting the solution," Mr van Velzen told CEF. "If we had involved the key-users more in the selection and the details of the solution, we would have saved time (and money).
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