Open Planets Foundation – A community hub for digital preservation

The bwFLA project (Baden-Wuerttemberg Functional Longterm Archiving and Access) is a two-year state sponsored project with the goal of defining and providing a practical implementation of archival workflows for the rendering of digital objects (i.e. easily accessed by users) in its original environment (i.e. application). Thereby, the project focuses on supporting the user during object INGEST to indentify, provide and describe all secondary objects required as well as create neccessary technical metadata for long-term ACCESS through emulation.

The typical reading room computer in libraries, archives and often museums is equipped with a way for patrons to search and browse the institutions catalogues and digital collections. The digital collections are often rather restricted by the systems to making accessible only a few of today’s multimedia formats and documents types (for example PDF, jpeg and a few audio or video formats). For modern memory institutions it would be desirable to offer the users access to a much wider range of different types of digital object within the holdings.