Open Source Software for Digital Preservation Repositories : A Survey

摘要

In the digital age, the amount of data produced is growing exponentially. Governments and institutions canno longer rely on old methods for storing data and passing on the knowledge to future generations. Digitaldata preservation is a mandatory issue that needs proper strategies and tools. With this awareness, effortsare being made to create and perfect software solutions capable of responding to the challenge of properlypreserving digital information. This paper focuses on the state-of-the-art in open-source software solutionsfor the digital preservation and curation field used to assimilate and disseminate information to designatedaudiences. Eleven open source projects for digital preservation are surveyed in areas such as supportedstandards and protocols, strategies for preservation, methodologies for reporting, dynamic of development,targeted operating systems, multilingual support and open source license. Furthermore, five of these opensource projects, are further analysed, with focus on features deemed important for the area. Along opensource solutions, the paper also briefly surveys the standards and protocols relevant for digital datapreservation. The area of digital data preservation repositories has several open source solutions, whichcan form the base to overcome the challenges to reach mature and reliable digital data preservation.