Overall Goals

The Digital Stacks project aims at testing on a large scale a long term infrastructure for the deposit of digital resources. The developed architecture intends to ‘separate’ the elements that will be more stable from those depending on the technologies in use in a certain period of time. In fact the digital object is composed of two main aspects:

• it is support independent and this facilitates its preservation over time. For example, a file can be duplicated easily and sent as an e-mail attachment without losing any of its physical or informative features

• it derives from a particular technological environment. Technology constantly evolves and in few years a certain set of tools (hardware and software) could be unavailable, seriously jeopardising the access to the digital object.

So the problems to be solved concern not only the permanence and durability of the supports (CD-ROM, DVD, etc.), but also the readability over time of current formats (for example,. pdf,. doc,. mp3, etc.) which will certainly evolve and change in the near future.

The objectives of Digital Stacks are:

• the set up of a hardware and software infrastructure which is scalable and capable to tackle the technological change in a sustainable way

• the evaluation and benchmark of the main software for the management of digital repositories

• implementation of the activities necessary to certify the Digital Stacks as a trusted digital repository.