Alliance for Permanent Access (APA) Conference

8-9 November 2011, London

This is a brief report on the Alliance for Permanent Access (APA) Conference held at London during 8-9 November 2011, organized by Dr. David Giaretta, Director APA, Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), UK. This alliance comprising of many European partner organizations aims at developing a sustainable European Digital Information infrastructure that guarantees the permanent access to the digital records of science, whether documents or data, across all fields of research, scholarship and technology. The grandness of APA conference was evident through the active participation of member organizations from Europe, the digital preservation experts, archivists and technologists from all over the world.

The conference focused on various frontier topics such as digital preservation of scientific data and records; opportunities for data exchange; infrastructure, technologies and services; digital preservation policies; riding the wave – the view to 2030, requirements of archivists and data users, drivers and barriers to data sharing, audit and certification of digital repositories.

The conference had presentations from the representatives of prominent international digital preservation initiatives from different countries such as Dr. David Giaretta who spearheads many digital preservation projects of the European Union; Dr. Martha Anderson, NDIIPP, USA; Prof Matthias Hemmje, NESTOR, Germany; Dr Salvatore Mele, ODE Project, CERN; and several other experts leading the EU funded digital preservation projects. The Indian initiative - Centre of Excellence for Digital Preservation project of C-DAC was also represented by Dr. Dinesh Katre during the APA Conference. The industry perspective of digital preservation was also captured through the presentations from Microsoft Research Connections, IBM Haifa Research Laboratory, Oracle, Google, etc.