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Goal
The overall goal of InterPARES 3 is to enable small and medium-sized public
and private archival organizations and programs, which are responsible for the digital
records resulting from government, business, research, art and entertainment, social and/or
community activities, to preserve over the long term authentic records that satisfy the
requirements of their stakeholders and society’s needs for an adequate record of its past.
Objectives
- to promote an environment supportive of the research goal by demonstrating to regulatory
and auditing bodies and to policy makers that it is essential to integrate digital
records preservation requirements in any activity that they regulate, audit or control;
- to collaborate with small and medium-sized archival organizations and programs in
the development of scalable policies, strategies, procedures and/or action plans that
they can implement to preserve the digital materials that they expect to acquire
or have already acquired, using the recommendations and products of leading-edge research
projects;
- to assess the applicability of the recommendations of InterPARES and other projects
about trusted record-making and recordkeeping to the situations of the small and medium-sized
archival organizations or programs selected as test-beds, and in particular the
validity of statements about the relationship between preservers and records creators;
- to assess the applicability of these projects’ preservation solutions to the
concrete cases identified by the test-bed partners as needing immediate attention,
both when the records in question are already in their custody and when they still
reside with their creator;
- to refine and further elaborate the theory and methods, concepts and principles
developed by these research projects on the basis of the results of the above activities;
- to establish when such theory and methods, concepts and principles apply across
jurisdictions, regardless of legal/administrative, social and cultural environment;
and, in the situation where they do not apply, to identify why, and determine the measures
that are required to ensure the preservation of digital records;
- to assist small and medium-sized archival organizations or programs in addressing
the legal issues that have been identified by the relevant research projects as providing
obstacles to long-term digital preservation, and those that could be specific to their
situation;
- to formulate models that, for each choice of preservation methods and of digital
objects to be preserved, identify the ethical consequences for individuals and society;
- to create evaluation models capable of measuring the success of the preservation
solutions that have been proposed and implemented;
- to develop models of preservation costs for various types of records and archives;
- to develop awareness and educational materials that can: (a) enable the staff of small
archival organizations and programs to plan for and carry out digital preservation,
(b) assist professional associations in promoting career development of their members,
and (c) provide university programs with content and structure for university courses
on digital preservation; and to identify effective delivery methods;
- to ensure transfer of the knowledge generated by this research—including actual
examples and success stories—to appropriate local, national and international
stakeholders; and
- to establish a strong network of research and education on digital preservation
that is deeply rooted in the various communities served by each of its partners, and
that integrates academic work with social and community action.
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