Posted on 26 May 2015
The digital environment calls for new strategies in the production, management and preservation of digital documents throughout their entire lifecycle that differ from workflows in traditional paper based environments. Archivists, working in close collaboration with computer technicians, have to ensure that digital collections may be preserved in trusted long term digital repositories and may be accessed by future users.
To illustrate and raise awareness on the main changes introduced by the digital environment, on 18 – 19 May 2015, the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU) hosted the seminar “Lightweight, transparent, permanent and sustainable: management and preservation of digital documents", organised by the Italian Association of Archivists (ANAI) in collaboration with the HAEU.
The first of the two day seminar focused on defining concepts such as authenticity, originals and copies in the digital environment by means of diplomatics (Professor Gianni Penzo Doria, University of Insubria). Criteria and rules governing document workflows in the Italian and European digital administration were relevant topics of the second half of the day (Ilaria Pescini, Tuscany Region, and Samir Musa, HAEU).
The second day drew the participants’ attention to the model of long term digital preservation initially developed by NASA, known as OAIS (Professor Mariella Guercio, La Sapienza University, Rome). Some practical cases of successful application of that model were presented such as Magazzini Digitali, the long term preservation system used by the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (BNCF) for the legal deposit of digital publications (Giovanni Bergamin, BNCF), as well as an outstanding commercial application in the area of digital healthcare (Umberto Ferri, Medas Solutions). Finally, a presentation on the importance of web archiving focusing on the archival of websites of the European institutions undertaken by the Historical Archives of the European Union (Monica Steletti, HAEU).
ANAI Toscana webpage