Digital Preservation of Cultural Heritage for Small Institutions

Abstract

In this article we describe a concept for the digital preservation of the cultural heritage of smaller cultural institutions without their own infrastructure, in order to preserve and use digital objects in the long term. For this purpose, a digital archive will be extended by a pre-ingest component, which will aggregate the digital objects of the cultural institutions and provide access to the archived information. The proposed system for distributed digital preservation can be described by an extended Open Archive Information System (OAIS) reference model—the Outer-Inner OAIS (OO-IO) model. In the Federal state of Brandenburg there are about 340 archives, museums and libraries. Most of them are rather small but of great significance for cultural heritage. The digital preservation of data and information is therefore one of the biggest challenges. Unfortunately, smaller institutions often lack the knowledge and the resources to meet this challenge. The described approach supports these cultural and research institutions in their efforts to preserve cultural heritage.