Welcome to the CASPAR Preservation User Community!

Digital information innervates modern civilization.

Yet digital information is extremely vulnerable. A huge amount of precious digital information created and stored all over the world becomes unaccessible every few years at a very fast pace. Think of losing official records, a museum archive, irreplaceable scientific data, or even a collection of family photos, and we realize digital preservation is affecting us all.

This website serves the project CASPAR - Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval - an Integrated Project co-financed by the European Union within the Sixth Framework Programme (Priority IST-2005-2.5.10, "Access to and preservation of cultural and scientific resources"), that started on 1 April 2006.

CASPAR will research, implement, and disseminate innovative solutions for digital preservation based on the OAIS reference model (ISO:14721:2003).

The website provides official project documentation and material relevant to digital preservation and related disciplines. It also serves as an information and communication tool for the CASPAR Preservation User Community.

The CASPAR Preservation Workflow Diagram

 CASPAR methodological and technological solution:

• is compliant to the OAIS Reference Model - the main standard of reference in digital preservation
• is technology-neutral: the preservation environment could be implemented using any kind of emerging technology
• adopts a distributed, asynchronous, loosely coupled architecture and each key component is self-contained and portable: it may be deployed without dependencies on different platform and framework
• is domain independent: it could be applied with low additional effort to multiple domains/contexts.
• preserves knowledge and intelligibility, not just the “bits”
• guarantees the integrity and identity of the information preserved as well as the protection of digital rights