Distributed Custodial Archival Preservation Environments

Purpose:

The goal of the DCAPE project is to build a distributed production preservation environment that meets the needs of archival repositories for trusted archival preservation services. The preservation environment will build upon the technologies developed at UNC at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and the data storage infrastructure being installed. The preservation environment includes a trusted digital repository infrastructure that is assembled from state-of-the-art rule-based data management systems, commodity storage systems, and sustainable preservation services. The software infrastructure automates many of the administrative tasks associated with management of archival repositories and validation of trustworthiness.

RENCI and faculty at SILS/UNC will work with expert archivist partners from state archives, university archives and cultural archives to demonstrate the viability of the distributed custodial preservation approach as a production service. We have assembled a partnership of 28 people across 9 institutions and 4 staff at UNC, for a total of 32 participants. The institutions are:

Press Release:

See DICE Research News, Nov. 7, 2008: "Sustainable Preservation That Works"

Point of Contact:

Richard Marciano
School of Information and Library Science (SILS)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH)
202 Manning Hall, CB#3360
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360
Tel: 919-962-0033 --- Fax: 919-962-8071
Email: marciano@unc.edu --- Web: http://www.diceresearch.org