data grids for conservation of cultural inheritance
Data Grids offer redundant and huge distributed storage capabilities, providing an ideal and secure place for the long-term preservation of digitized literary works and documents of artistic and historical relevance. In fact, digitazion has been progressively using as a means for avoiding the loss of literary heritage on paper, caused by physical ageing and the environmental conditions in which documents are kept. Document consultation is another problem that leads to additional deterioration. Multiple copies of high resolutions scans stored in a distributed environment and made available for consultation with a easy to use interface is a means to guarantee conservation of cultural heritage. Grid authentication and authorisation mechanisms allow a fine-grained access to archives by single users, groups or entire communities. Moreover, metadata services permit a structured organisation of scanned files for quick searches. Two use cases have been considered to demonstrate how grid digital libraries can guarantee enduring preservation of literary heritage: the archives of the work of Italian writer Federico De Roberto, made up of almost 8000 scans, and the musical and the musical archives of the "Civilt Musicale Napoletana" project, made up of more than 250,000 digitizations. A working prototype of the De Roberto digital repository has been implemented on the gLibrary platform, a grid-based system to host and manage digital libraries developed by INFN Catania, on the Sicilian e-infrastructure of the COMETA consortium.
cultural heritage digital libraries federico de roberto data preservation grid computing data availability