A. Verheusen
In the last ten years many cultural heritage institutions in the Netherlands have been digitising their material on a large scale. The national digitisation program "The Memory of the Netherlands" gave another big push to this. The storage of the master files of these projects, the tiff-files, mostly is not very well considered. Often thousands of tiff-files are stored on CD, DVD, tape or hard disk; lacking a good administration. Because of the high costs of scanning and the growing need to reuse the tiffs for other purposes, this is not a preferable situation. In the Netherlands the government is also stressing the need to make sure the expensive digitised material can be used again when needed in the future.
In 2003 the National Library of the Netherlands took the initiative to start a project to investigate the possibilities for the long-term storage of tiff-files from the cultural institutions. In the project there are two main objectives. A system is being developed for the storage of tiffs and a businessplan is being written to explore the feasibility of a national service. The service is going to be build according to a business-to-business model. In this perspective the project is innovative in the world of the cultural heritage institutions.
At the end of the project in december 2005 the National Library hopes to have reached a clear insight into the technological problems and possibilities of a tiff-archive. Also we hope to know more details about the costs of building and maintaining a national service for this. At the end of the pilot an evaluation will take place and a decision will be made about whether or not the system will be taken in production.
The paper will focus on the results of the project.
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