8th September 2010

Tools to ensure that digitally stored data can be preserved, accessed and understood for the indefinite future are now available in the form of open source software. Until now large volumes of electronic data such as official records, museum archives and scientific results have been unreadable or at risk of loss because newer technologies could not read it. Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda said: "Digital information is extremely vulnerable and also extremely valuable. Anyone who has lost access to family photos or old documents will know the frustration of dealing with incompatible technologies. I am very excited by the potential of CASPAR's tools and techniques to ensure sustained quality of and access to valuable data in the future."

Funded with € 8.8 million of EU funds, the CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval) research programme involved researchers from the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Israel, Italy and the UK. CASPAR addresses a very wide range of issues surrounding the preservation of all types of digitally encoded information and how it could be used in the future. It can describe the data well enough so that the numbers could be extracted in the future - the equivalent of being able to print them. But CASPAR also ensures that the numbers, and the relationships between them, can be understood and be easy to use in whatever software, and for whatever research, scientists in the future might wish.

"Digital technology has revolutionised the way we deal with knowledge and information, especially in scientific domains such as astronomy or climatology that rely on the quantitative analysis of large data sets over a long period of time. For example, evidence of the influence of human activities on global warming has been recorded for several decades now. Despite the evolution of data recording technologies, from punch cards and magnetic tapes to cloud computing on huge servers, the ability to access and understand information in the future in a landscape of evolving technologies remains crucial to scientific progress" added Neelie Kroes.

Huge amounts of vastly different information are encoded digitally. Some kinds of data are like documents - for example libraries preserve a printed document on a shelf and in the future people taking it from the shelf would be able to read it. The digital equivalent means being able, in the future, to take the word processor file and be able to print it.

The CASPAR open source software is available for free download from www.casparpreserves.eu or sourceforge.net/projects/digitalpreserve/files/