NIEMAND Archiving initiative in The Netherlands
NIEMAND is the Dutch acronym for National Initiative for sustainable and endurable Electronic Multimedia Archiving.
On 21 June 2006 at the Records Management Convention in Health conference in The Hague, the NIEMAND initiative will be announced. The initiative will be supported by institutions and organizations currently developing or running a digital archive or operational repository. The organizations and institutions are all in the public sector but with distinct operational focus: healthcare, intelligence and academic, cultural and historical heritage.
NIEMAND will loosely bundle the knowledge across disciplines to ensure the cost-effective and durable archiving (preservation and curation) of digital content without interfering with organizational or institutional practices relative to the technologies used.
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Principles for cooperation
Working together on a networked public infrastructure for digital preservation and curation with the following principles.
1. The cooperative network guarantees the preservation and curation of all digital content, by applying standard formats and application independence as data enters the Archive Grid for each participating organization or institution.
a. The Archive Grid is managed by the cooperation, and as an organization guarantees authenticity and integrity of data independently of individual institutions participating in the Archive Grid
b. The Archive Grid will be the master/reference for the organization's or institution's data. It can restore active repository data in case of a disaster at the institution and manages the passive repository data off-site (to minimize risk of data loss from a natural catastrophe).
c. The Archive Grid is the collection of all pooled/shared institution and participating datacenters capacity in the cooperation.
d. The Archive can only be accessed by designated institution administrators.
e. Each institution has its own managed active repository (if needed with local disaster recovery/failover) and can therefore run their applications independent from the availability of the Archive Grid. Transactions at the Archive Grid level cannot influence the performance of active repositories at the institutional level.
2. All data in the Archive Grid may be pooled/shared for research purposes (if and when allowed).
a. Every institution can and should create their own interpretation/knowledge and research about datasets and this Intellectual Property is (probably copyright) protected.
o Every institution can do this for the Total Collection of (medical) data in the (international) cooperation and is not limited by the institution boundaries.
o The cooperation manages the ?public? metadata part of the Archive Grid and arranges the distribution of information from the Deep Archive to specific research or public repositories. The content of the ?public metadata? catalogue is agreed upon by the cooperation.
o Good access control guarantees that only information that the user or network has authorized to share is accessible for specific research purposes.
3. The cooperation network guarantees that each patient/consumer can build his/her own patient/public record and take it with him/her (in the latest technology format) at any time and place wanted.
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Structure
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The Service Levels
Service Level 1 = IT infrastructure independence
- Bitstream/data integrity and authenticity by Archive Grid.
- No preservation format/application independence.
- Need statement on number of copies and locations of copies to minimize risk of data loss. A preferred number is 2 copies plus the original, stored at 3 sites.
Service Level 2 = Application independence
- (Deep) Archive Cooperation members defined standards, guarantee application independence/information access.
Service Level 3 = Sharing cooperation content for research and other (public) services.
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