Open Source Software for Digital Preservation Repositories: a Survey

Abstract

In the digital age, the amount of data produced is growing exponentially. Governments and institutions can no longer rely on old methods for storing data and passing on the knowledge to future generations. Digital data preservation is a mandatory issue that needs proper strategies and tools. With this awareness, efforts are being made to create and perfect software solutions capable of responding to the challenge of properly preserving digital information. This paper focuses on the state-of-the-art in open-source software solutions for the digital preservation and curation field used to assimilate and disseminate information to designated audiences. Eleven open source projects for digital preservation are surveyed in areas such as supported standards and protocols, strategies for preservation, methodologies for reporting, dynamic of development, targeted operating systems, multilingual support and open source license. Furthermore, five of these open source projects, are further analysed, with focus on features deemed important for the area. Along open source solutions, the paper also briefly surveys the standards and protocols relevant for digital data preservation. The area of digital data preservation repositories has several open source solutions, which can form the base to overcome the challenges to reach mature and reliable digital data preservation.