The long term preservation for Higher Education and Research is one of the missions of CINES, ie the long-term preservation of data (well beyond 10 years).
Today the Centre is recognized for his offer based on:
- A team of specialists (including an archivist);
- A platform, software tools, based on norms and standards;
- Business process management of digital archives (eg consideration of technological developments related to accepted formats and media);
- Infrastructure and operational experience of a big center. CINES is the official website for archiving electronic theses, HAL open archives, journals in the humanities and social of PERSEE, etc..
Apart from these documents, a number of scientific data, results of observations or simulations destined for research or educational purposes, in various forms (tables of numbers, images, sounds, videos, …) are potential candidates for archiving. However, it is often difficult to select upstream those to be archived permanently.
CINES also implements a service “scientific data records preservation ” for user communities concerned. This service is a secure data storage, with a mandatory minimum set of descriptive metadata associated to facilitate research and understanding, for a specified period (3 or 4 years) and provide an opportunity for shared access to these data for the community.
At the end of that time, as determined by the producer, the selected data will be transfered to ultimate archive or returned to the user for destruction or storage in his laboratory.
Of course this service is provided for a community of “structured” users who share the same data formats (standard exchange formats, to be used for the archive) and willing to implement an approach combining diffusion and long-term preservation.
This is not a solution for long-term storage of data but an approach to facilitate the preparation of a permanent archive.
The implementation of this service is as part of the project ISAAC: Scientific Information Archived at CINES.
Contact : equipe-isaac@cines.fr