Austria's Federal Monuments Authority leverages E-ARK specifications for future-proofing cultural heritage

The Federal Monuments Authority of Austria (Bundesdenkmalamt, BDA) is at the forefront of preserving the nation’s cultural heritage, not only concerning monuments and physical objects of cultural value but increasingly also in the digital domain. As technology advances and the need for long-term accessibility of historical records grows, the BDA must develop and maintain a digital preservation system that ensures the longevity of Austria’s cultural memory.

Over the past few decades, considerable efforts have been made to digitise historical documents, photographs, maps, and other cultural assets, which date back to the 1850s. The challenge now lies in guaranteeing that these digital assets remain usable, comprehensible, and accessible for future generations, despite the inevitable changes in technology.

In response to this growing need, the BDA, in collaboration with Austria’s Federal Chancellery and the Austrian State Archives, has embarked on an ambitious project to implement an open-source digital preservation system tailored to meet long-term preservation goals. After extensive evaluation of various systems, the team chose to implement RODA, an open-source solution developed by the Portuguese company Keep Solutions. RODA is designed to ensure compliance with European standards, most notably the E-ARK specifications—a framework developed under the European Commission’s eArchiving Initiative. These specifications provide a standardised approach to the preservation, exchange, and reuse of digital records across Europe.

The power of E-ARK specifications

RODA’s integration with the E-ARK specifications is a big step for Austria’s digital preservation efforts. The specifications are designed to support long-term migration strategies, ensuring that information about file formats and preservation needs is always accessible and actionable. By defining standardised data representations, E-ARK helps preserve the integrity of digital assets while allowing for future transformations when needed.

One of the most important features of the E-ARK framework is its ability to document every preservation action, ensuring transparency and trust. Each migration step is meticulously logged, including details such as the reasons behind the migration, the individuals responsible, the software used, decisions made, and rights associated with the digital assets. This level of documentation empowers future archivists and researchers to fully understand and trust the authenticity and provenance of these records.

Custom tools for seamless integration

With support from the Federal Computing Centre (Bundesrechenzentrum, BRZ), a custom SIP creation tool was created to transform data from producer systems to E-ARK conformant SIPs. There are two main producer systems:

• The national Electronic Records Management System ELAK (Der elektronische Akt), which releases electronic records of mixed type, i.e., they contain e-mails, electronic documents, notes and metadata in different formats. Record data and metadata are aggregated into an Electronic Data Interchange for Documents (EDIDOC, a standard packaging format for information exchange used by Austrian authorities like court of lw, public administrative body, etc.) container. The EDIDOC consists of a schema-based XML document that includes a description of metadata and content as well as the content documents themselves (e.g., Word, PDF, Excel files, packed in a container (ZIP). 
• The Digitisation Management System “Goobi" releases image collections containing sets of images with corresponding metadata.

In relation to the two producer systems, there are two main use cases to prepare for the initial ingest of existing digital assets:

Use case 1: Archiving electronic records

This use case is implemented by BDA and the RODA system is ready to perform ingests with production data. This concerns the records generated by "ELAK", which employs the following structured workflow:

1. Quality assurance through a test environment: before full-scale archiving, a sample set of records is processed in a testing environment. This step allows metadata mapping and validation to be fine-tuned before moving to the final production stage.
2. Metadata mapping and conversion: the electronic record is transformed into a standardised format, ensuring that all metadata is correctly structured for preservation. The format used is adapted to comply with established archival standards, such as Encoded Archival Description (EAD).
3. Final ingest and storage: once validated, the electronic records are ingested into the production environment, forming an Archival Information Package (AIP).

Use Case 2: Preserving digitised image collections

While this use case is still in the planning stages, it presents an exciting challenge. Nevertheless, the main ideas are briefly outlined here. Generally, a different challenge arises when handling large, digitised image collections. Unlike electronic records, they are significantly larger, making efficient storage and management a priority.

A possible approach is to, instead of moving large image files into the preservation system, the images remain stored in the Object Store where they were originally placed by the digitisation management system. This approach minimises duplication and optimises storage resources. This would require the preservation system to create archival packages that reference the externally stored image data. This method ensures that metadata and descriptive information are properly preserved while the bulk of the image data remains untouched in its original storage location. This innovative method of handling archival image collections avoids unnecessary data movement and enhances efficiency, but it also raises an important challenge: how to ensure the long-term integrity and accessibility of collections managed in cloud-based storage like S3. As cloud storage solutions become increasingly common, finding sustainable and reliable strategies for maintaining digital collections stored in such environments will be crucial for digital preservation.

Looking ahead: a future-proof solution

The BDA’s initiative to integrate E-ARK specifications with the RODA system marks a significant milestone in Austria’s digital preservation efforts. By leveraging these standards and tools, the BDA is setting a benchmark for how cultural heritage can be preserved in the digital age, ensuring that future generations will have access to Austria’s rich cultural legacy, regardless of technological advances.

This innovative approach is more than just a success for the BDA; it is a shining example of how standardised frameworks like E-ARK can be leveraged to safeguard digital records on a global scale, helping other institutions across Europe, and beyond, secure the longevity of their digital cultural assets.