Managed by the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL), which represents both university and national libraries across the UK and Ireland, the Cedars-project (CURL Exemplars in Digital Archives)17 was officially launched on the April 1st, 1998. Lead sites in the project take the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds, and Oxford, however, cooperation with various other institutions including the British Library, the Arts and Humanities Data Service, and the Research Libraries Group exists and is promoted. The Cedars-project being a Higher Education-initiative is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as part of the Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme. Originally planned to last three years the project was prolonged and is now scheduled to end in March 2002.
Cedars' aim is to explore the challenges posed by the archival storage and long-term preservation of digital information. Thereby, issues will be approached on both a practical basis by establishing prototypes, as well as on a strategic, methodological level, developing guidelines and formulating strategic frameworks [Rus00].
Consequently, research on preservation strategies and techniques is at the core of the project. Special emphasis is given to the Emulation-approach, yet, it is tried to contrast the various strategies weighing their features and drawbacks. A further concern is to document and disseminate strategic frameworks regarding collection management policies, such that individual archives are able to develop a specific solution apt to their requirements. For both, the long-term preservation strategy and the collection management, metadata is an important means. For this reason, elements have been identified general enough to be applicable for a wide range of digital objects.
However, challenges are not only viewed from a rather technical perspective taking into account that organisational and management issues are as important and complex. Therefore, issues including finances, intellectual property rights, and staffing with a special look at required skills and expertise are also addressed.
The establishment of digital archives is thoroughly covered by the OAIS-model (cf. Section 3.6) and, hence, Cedars has been strongly influenced by it. A demonstrator archive has been implemented based on the OAIS-model, which has adopted a distributed architecture spread across all three partner institutions. It helped both to test and promote the technical and organisational feasibility [Ced01].
Further on, it is expected that Cedars will influence legislation for legal deposit of electronic materials and, generally spoken, promotes awareness about the importance of digital preservation.