CEF eArchiving in Action event a great success
The CEF eArchiving team is pleased to announce that their three-day event, eArchiving in Action, was a great success, with an outstanding grand total of 442 registrants, and an average of 200 participants per day.
This event was an opportunity for various professionals to learn how they and their organisations can benefit from the CEF eArchiving Building Block. eArchiving facilitates the secure preservation of data over the long-term for future reuse, in line with European standards, ensuring interoperability so your data can be migrated across different generations of systems.
The event kicked off with a general introduction to eArchiving, followed by a different workshop each day tailored to different players in the data preservation value chain:
- Data producers: anyone with information that needs to be preserved or reused;
- Archives and preservation: Organisations responsible for digital archiving activities;
- Solution providers: software and service providers for the digital preservation of data.
Highlights
On day one of the event, representatives from the Norwegian Health Archives gave a presentation on how CEF eArchiving helped them build a system for preserving various kinds of digital data, from patient records originally created electronically to those converted to a digital format.
The second day focused on busting common myths. As one expert said, 'even if some people say it is, making digital copies and storing them is not archiving'. Preserving digital data for future reuse, while the technology around us constantly evolves and improves, is a difficult challenge - 'doing nothing simply is not an option'. Thanks in part to its international standards and open specifications for digital archiving, the eArchiving Building Block is helping numerous organisations overcome this challenge, ensuring their data remains trustworthy and reusable over the long-term, across different generations of systems.
Day three welcomed two finalists, including the winner, of the Digital Innovation Challenge, a competition inviting European SMEs to come up with innovative new services using the CEF Building Blocks. They presented their new services and exactly how the Building Blocks, especially eArchiving, are helping deliver them. The winners, CleverBooks, designed a virtual education platform leveraging augmented reality technology. eArchiving will allow the platform to store the results and educational progress of users over time.
The eArchiving team also announced that an eArchiving Building Block conformance stamp will be made available to certify archiving solutions that have implemented eArchiving-conformant specifications.
Data anonymisation is a key concern
Some participants were concerned about the anonymisation of data in eArchiving. This is addressed in the Data Governance Act - take a look!
If you have any other questions about eArchiving, you can visit the service desk.
'There is no one-size-fits-all solution, that's why interoperability is key.'
The third day’s final discussion ended by reflecting on the real added value brought by eArchiving – that is, the importance of universal, open standards for the digital preservation and reuse of information, making collaboration between organisations across the information lifecycle significantly easier.
The problems of long-term preservation and reuse of data cannot be solved by simply 'throwing more computing power' at archiving solutions. eArchiving's open standards, which guarantee interoperability across sectors, borders and generations of different systems, as well as reusable, modular components making it easy to scale up or adapt solutions, are helping numerous organisations collaborate in a cost-effective, sustainable approach to the digital preservation and reuse of data.