E-Archiving WG/7

E-Archiving WG/17

17 September 1998

Second report to the Archive Committee

from Electronic Archiving Working Group

Prepared by Jennifer Paul and Corrado Pettenati

1. Mandate of the WG

"The WG mandate is to explore the size and the typology of the electronic documents at CERN, their current status and to prepare a basis for an organised records management and an archiving policy to preserve their historical, scientific and economical value."

2. Work in progress

We have progressed with the implementation of the WG mandate. The WG has now explored most of the electronic document collections currently managed at CERN.

We have carried out extensive studies on the following information systems at CERN: E-mail, CERN Document Server (formerly Preprints Server), NICE, CDD (CERN Drawings Directory) and CEDAR (EDMS at CERN). The studies have been realised with the use of a standard questionnaire prepared by the WG. A full set of reports, based on the questionnaire, is available on demand from the Archives.

The idea is to evaluate how close each system is to the CIS (Certified Information System) profile announced in our first report.

3. Composition of the Working Group

The group members are D. Foster, J.-Y. LeMeur, J. Paul, C. Pettenati (Chairman) and A. Taddei.

4. Meetings held

Since the presentation of the WG’s first report to the Archives Committee on 9th March, the WG has held six meetings. This brings the total number of meetings to ten.

5. Next steps

The first priority of the WG is to continue to study CERN’s existing information systems. The other systems to be examined are: WWW, Contract Follow-Up system and PE Division databases.

At the end of this tour we will make a comparative analysis of the embedded design of each system and the level of their CIS compliance. Our findings will be reported to the Committee.

Later the WG will expand upon the general design announced in its first report in order to specify design and implementation options for a CERN-wide electronic archiving interface. The WG will also try to evaluate in its next report to the Archives Committee, the resources needed for such a project.

6. External contacts

Despite the Archive Committee Chairman’s strong commitment to the electronic archiving project and the positive feedback received from the current and future DGs, we have not been able to get any extra financial support to have direct external contacts and/or consultancies. To date, all contacts have been maintained via e-mail and all information on electronic archiving issues and projects have been collected using the Web.

In particular, we have lost the opportunity to participate in a specialised conference on "Preservation of Digital Information" in Tomar (Lisbon) Portugal on 17-19 June 1998, see: http://crack.inesc.pt/events/ercim/delos6/call.html where several other organisations with similiar electronic archiving projects were represented.

However, as announced in the first progress report, a seminar entitled "Issues in and approaches to electronic archiving" by David Bearman, an expert in electronic archiving from the US, has been organised by the Scientific Information Service, on behalf of the CERN Archives, on 6th October 1998 at CERN. The seminar will be held in bldg. 60-6-015 at 15h30. All the Archives Committee members are warmly invited to attend.