Dr. Dinesh Katre is Associate Director and Head of Department at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune, India
It is a matter of great pride for me to have associated myself with the global cause of preserving information in digital era. I wish to congratulate the team of Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) for taking this initiative to celebrate International Digital Preservation Day (IDPD)! This can be a very effective tool for creating awareness about rampant digital obsolescence among general public.
We have been working on digital preservation in India since 2009. I take this opportunity to present an overview of “Centre of Excellence for Digital Preservation”, the flagship project undertaken as part the National Digital Preservation Programme sponsored by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India. The Centre of Excellence of Digital Preservation is established at C-DAC, Pune, INDIA. Being the Principal Investigator (PI) of this project, I would like to share information on major outcomes of this project.
Defining the preservation metadata standard and common guidelines acceptable to all stakeholders is the foundation of any digital preservation programme. As the Indian initiative focused more on e-governance records, we produced the preservation metadata standard for e-records combined with guidelines for production of preservable e-records. The standard is notified to all e-Governance projects funded by government of India. However, how to implement the standard is a bigger challenge! Therefore, we developed a number of digital preservation tools which can be given to the memory institutions and records creating organizations for long term preservation.
We have developed our own software framework for digital archiving named as DIGITĀLAYA (डिजिटालय in Hindi language) which is customizable for various domains, data types and application contexts such as
- E-records management & archival (a variety of born digital records produced by organizations on day-to-day basis)
- Large volume of e-governance records
- Audiovisual archives
- Digital libraries / document archives
A number of digital preservation tools have been developed as under
- e-acquisition tool
- Pre-archival data processing tool
- e-records extraction tool
- Metadata importing and aggregation tool
- Any to any metadata conversion tool
- Data encryption and transfer tool
- PDF/A converter tool
- Large scale ingesting platform using Hadoop distributed processing platform
All the archival systems and digital preservation tools are developed in such a way that they enable in producing evidences / reports as required for the audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories (ISO 16363).
We also developed pilot digital repositories using our own tools and technologies for National archive of India, New Delhi; Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts; New Delhi; Museum of India, Stamps and registration Department, Hyderabad; and e-District. National Cultural Audiovisual Archive (NCAA) established by IGNCA, New Delhi is the most notable digital repository, which is established using DIGITĀLAYA (डिजिटालय). It is available online at www.ncaa.gov.in
NCAA is in advance stage of auditing for ISO 16363 by Primary Trustworthy Digital Repository Authorisation Body (PTAB), UK which has been accredited by NABCB, New Delhi, India.
Based on the experience gained from this project, Government of India is considering to create a national policy on digital preservation which will be instrumental in establishing national digital preservation infrastructure.
Presently, we are working on another prestigious project i.e. to develop National Virtual Library of India (NVLI) which is funded by Ministry of Culture, Government of India. In this project, we are developing search and retrieval, big data analytics, ontologies, semantic linking, large scale data processing for massive volumes of data.