On the 29th May 2024, in the European Commission’s Albert Borschette Conference Building, the eArchiving Initiative organised a hybrid event to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the launch of the E-ARK project, the first precursor of the eArchiving Initiative. The event entitled “10 years of eArchiving: Reflections and insights for the next decade” was attended by over 130 people both onsite and online. The event discussed both the milestones of the last ten years and the challenges for the future in generating a European environment for digital archiving.
The event was opened by Rehana Schwinninger-Ladak, (Head of Unit Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CNECT) of the European Commission), Fulgencio Sanmartín (Policy officer, DG CNECT), Master of Ceremonies Ross King (Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) and Janet Anderson (Highbury R&D, Ireland).
This was followed by a roundtable that included several people involved in the previous iterations of eArchiving including: Jože Škofljanec (Archives of the Republic of Slovenia), Adrian Brown (E-ARK project expert: 2014–2017, UK Parliamentary Archives), Tom Fillis (eArchiving Building Block Stakeholder Management Office), John Sheridan (UK National Archives), Anders Bo Nielsen (eArchiving Building Block Coordinator: 2019–2020 and Danish National Archives) and Alina Senn (E-ARK project officer, DG CNECT). This roundtable discussed the milestones of the last ten years, and their hopes for the future. Some of the key ideas presented in the roundtable included exploring the challenges of access and intellectual control in digital archives and working towards making digital preservation more affordable in low resource environments.
The second session of the day analysed the use cases of eArchiving by sector. Karin Bredenberg (Sydarkivera, Sweden), presented on the “E-ARK specifications in the core of the 10 years achievements”, discussing the adaptability of the E-ARK specifications to different use cases. Her presentation was followed by Koit Saarevet (National Archives of Estonia), that illustrated the use of SIARD specifications at the institution. He noted that using of specifications has allowed the National Archives of Estonia to preserve complex relational databases which could not have been preserved with their traditional methods. Milan Valadou (Meemoo, the Flemish Archives Institute), spoke on the use of E-ARK specifications in the ingest process, and remarked how the existence of flexible specifications has allowed them to provide customised ingest services according to the needs of their associate members. The session was concluded by Corinne Frappart (European Union Publications Office), one of the first adopters of eArchiving, who discussed the experience of using E-ARK specifications alongside the FRBR Standard.
The first afternoon session discussed the impact of the implementation of the E-ARK specifications by solution providers in their commercial products. Presentations were made by representatives of DOCBYTE from Belgium, KEEP SOLUTIONS from Portugal and nageru solutions from Spain. The vendors discussed the challenges involved in adopting the E-ARK specifications and how doing so aided their clients when implementing their digital preservation systems for archives, and especially how implementing eArchiving permits the interoperability of their products across Europe.
The session was followed by a roundtable on eArchiving in the context of national archives. The panel comprised: Jan Dalsten (Danish National Archives), Silvia Trani (Italian Central State Archives), Zbyšek Stodůlka (National Archives of the Czech Republic) and Violette Lévy (Interministerial Archives Service of France). The panellists discussed how their institutions have implemented the different components of the E-ARK specifications, and how this has helped their digital preservation strategies. All the panellists stressed the importance of having a common ground and common language, and creating and granting visibility to a broad community.
The final session of the day explored the challenges and concerns of eArchiving in the future. It opened with a presentation by Carlota Bustelo (Gabinete Umbus, Spain) on the recently released white paper eArchiving “Initiative supporting the eIDAS electronic archiving services”.
The new eIDAS regulation is the first time that EU legislation has mentioned electronic archiving. During her presentation Carlota emphasised the importance of collaboration between archival and technological practices.
The event concluded with an all E-ARK Consortium panel moderated by Julie Allen (Open Preservation Foundation) and including Sven Schlarb (AIT), Karin Bredenberg, Jaime Kaminski (Highbury R&D, Ireland), Franco Niccolucci (Prisma Italy) and Stina Westman (South Eastern Finland Technical University of Applied Sciences (XAMK)) which gathered the opinions from the audience on the future directions of eArchiving. The feedback from the attendees was varied and wide-ranging and will serve to guide the eArchiving Initiative for the foreseeable future. A small example of this input is: further developing the user communities by developing a framework for knowledge sharing to see who is using which eArchiving specifications, tools and services etc; the importance of digital archiving access tools; more focus on digital archiving sustainability; and Artificial Intelligence and archives.
Two quotes in particular sum up the practical nature of the event: “There is a community we can learn from” from Jan Dalsten and “Archives need to be used to be useful” from John Sheridan.
Fulgencio Sanmartín concluded the event and he remarked on the maturity of the specifications, which had just been released with a new version, encouraged the re-use of assets, called on solution providers to apply for the eArchiving Conformance Seal and highlighted the need to ensure multilingualism across eArchiving.
The eArchiving team found this event so useful that it is planned to hold an annual event in Brussels to gather feedback from our user communities.
Published presentations of the event are now available and recordings will be released in the coming weeks.