Tessella, an IT and consulting services company that provides digital archiving technology, is addressing the problem of long-term digital preservation. Its Safety Deposit Box (SDB) offering enables organizations to store and preserve digital information and, more importantly, to access this information even after several years…read more

Päivi Happonen, Development Director of The Finnish Archives, said; “The Finnish Archives’ task is to ensure that records belonging to the national cultural heritage are preserved. One of the many key reasons that we chose Tessella and Tieto was their proven track record of delivery.”

Sissi Kolbe, Tieto’s Director of Business Development in Information Management is delighted to continue working with Tessella; “Tieto always picks best of breed solutions and Tessella’s SDB is the perfect choice. This project follows on from our successful delivery of SDB to the National Archives of Estonia and we hope to further expand our operations with Tessella”.

Jon Tilbury, Tessella’s Director responsible for archiving technology, said; “We are very pleased to be working with The Finnish Archives and look forward to their input in the SDB User Group. They will become the ninth organisation to deploy SDB which is proving to be the long term preservation solution of choice in this demanding sector.”

Tilbury added: “We are again delighted to be using Tieto’s expertise in electronic content management and their understanding of how Nordic countries operate. We now have two successful collaborations underway in Estonia and Finland and hope to add many more”.

-Ends-

Notes to the Editor

About Tieto

Tieto is an IT service company providing IT, R&D and consulting services. With approximately 17 000 experts, we are among the leading IT service companies in Northern Europe and the global leader in selected segments. We specialize in areas where we have the deepest understanding of our customers’ businesses and needs. Our superior customer centricity and expertise in digital services set us apart from our competitors.

Further information available at www.tieto.com

About Tessella

Tessella is a world leader in the provision of Digital Archiving technologies, working with major governments worldwide. For more information about digital archiving solutions, visit www.digital-preservation.com

For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas. With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Further information available at www.tessella.com

Media Contact

Tessella | Christina Tealdi | PR/AR Executive

Phone: +44 (0) 1235 555511 | Mobile: + 44 (0) 779 9346453 |Christina.tealdi@tessella.com

Tessella plc, the information technology and consulting services company selected by R&D, science and engineering leaders for business-critical assignments, launches version of 4 of Tessella Safety Deposit Box (SDB4) at the 8th European Conference on Digital Archiving in Geneva, Switzerland…read more

Robert Sharpe, Head of Digital Preservation at  Tessella,  Christy Henshaw, Digitisation Project Manager at the Wellcome Library and Dave Thompson, Digital Curator, at the Wellcome Library will be giving an oral presentation on Managing “Visually lossless” Compression, on Thursday 3rd June 2010.

Also presenting will be Mark Evans, Digital Archives Practice Manager at Tessella and Mark Pickering, Archives & Records Management at AstraZeneca. They will be presenting on The eArchive Service: A practical, cost-effective and sustainable approach for preserving authentic electronic records at AstraZeneca on Wednesay, June 2nd 2010.

To find out more or to register online, visit www.imaging.org

Tessella’s Mark Evans, Digital Archiving Practice Manager, will giving a talk on Digital Archiving Initiatives: An international perspective,

To find out more about this event or to register online, visist www.archivists.ca

This is the conclusion of a report, Digital Divide: Assessing Organisations’ Preparations for Digital Preservation, released this month by the European Commission co-funded digital preservation project, Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services), this month. The report presents the findings of a survey into the work of 200 organisations worldwide to maintain long-term access to digital information.

Unlike information held in physical formats such as paper, information held in digital formats is prone to short lifetimes. Storage media can deteriorate rapidly and hardware or software required to read them can quickly become obsolete. Typically, digital information has a lifespan of years to decades rather than centuries.

The report highlights the rapid rate at which the volume of digital information is increasing and the importance organisations attach to preserving it for the long-term. Key findings:

• The volume of digital content that organisations expect to archive will rise 25-fold over the next decade from an average of 20 terabytes (TB) now to 500 TB in 2019.

• Eighty per cent of organisations already need to preserve documents and images now; 70 per cent will also need to hold onto databases, websites, audio and video files in ten years’ time.

• Ninety-three per cent of organisations are aware of the challenges of digital preservation. Seventy-six per cent include digital preservation in their operational planning, 71 per cent in their business-continuity planning and 62 per cent in their financial planning.

• Just 48 per cent of organisations have a digital preservation policy and 47 per cent a budget in place. This drops to one in four public sector institutions. Eighty-seven per cent of organisations plan to tackle digital preservation and 77 per cent plan to invest in a solution within two years.

• There is demand for technology to automate the processes of planning preservation, profiling collections and preserving content by converting it into more accessible formats.

• Organisations with a digital preservation policy are more likely to include digital preservation in their planning, three times more likely to have a budget for it, four times more likely to be investing in a solution now and three times more likely to have a long-term solution already in place. Those without a policy are four times more likely to have no experience of or be unaware of the problem, three times more likely to have no plans and twice as likely to put off purchasing a solution for over two years.

Dr Adam Farquhar, Programme Director and Head of Digital Library Technology at the British Library, which coordinates Planets said: “Work to preserve digital content for the long-term is led by organisations such as national libraries and archives which have large volumes of content and a legal and moral imperative. Over the next ten years, other types of organisation will be faced with the same challenges when the volume of digital content they hold rises to comparable levels and they are subject to legal, regulatory and commercial pressures.”

Preserving digital content requires ongoing action to convert information into new and accessible formats, or to simulate the environment in which it was created. It also requires the authors to document information so that a file can be interpreted in future.

Dr Robert Sharpe, Head of Digital Archiving Solutions at Tessella, which carried out the survey for Planets, said: “The move from information stored in paper to information stored in digital formats has presented organisations with new archival challenges and organisations must act now. It is clear, however, that organisations with a preservation policy are much further down the road to a solution than others.”

-ends-

For further information or to speak to Dr Adam Farquhar or Dr Robert Sharpe, contact:

Media Contacts

Christina Tealdi
AR/PR Executive
Tessella
+44 (0) 1235 546 638

christina.tealdi@tessella.com

Jane Humphreys
Planets Dissemination and Take-up Sub Project Lead
The British Library
+44 (0) 1937 546748

jane.humphreys@bl.uk

To download the report, visit: www.planets-project.eu

Notes to Editors

About Planets
Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) is a four-year €15 million project co-funded by the European Commission under its Information Society Technologies (IST) priority of the Sixth Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration (IST-033789).

Since 2006, the project has been working to develop a framework and a suite of technology to enable institutions in Europe to manage and access their digital collections for the long-term. Planets is coordinated by the British Library and delivered by 16 Consortium partners, comprising national archives, national libraries, research institutions and commercial companies in Europe.

For more information, visit: www.planets-project.eu

About Tessella
For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas.

Tessella has proven expertise in the area of reliable and authentic long-term preservation of electronic records, for both government and scientific organizations. In recent years a number of mainly academic and government organizations have been at the cutting edge of facing up to the digital preservation challenge and Tessella plays a key role in a number of the most practical of these initiatives.

With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

Dr Robert Sharpe is the co-author of Mind the Gap: Assessing Digital Preservation Needs in the UK, which was published by the Digital Preservation Coalition in 2006. The report was the culmination of a UK Digital Preservation Needs Assessment (UKNA) study to investigate the current state of digital preservation in the UK and to assess and develop a clear way forward.

For more information please visit: www.digital-preservation.com

The Austrian National Library and the Technical University of Vienna are hosting iPRES 2010, the seventh in the series of annual international conferences that brings together researchers and practitioners from around the world to explore the latest trends, innovations, and practices in preserving our digital heritage.

Digital Preservation and Curation is evolving from a niche activity to an established practice and research field that involves various disciplines and communities. iPRES 2010 will re-emphasise that preserving our scientific and cultural digital heritage requires integration of activities and research across institutional and disciplinary boundaries to adequately address the challenges in digital preservation. iPRES 2010 will further strengthen the link between digital preservation research and practitioners in memory institutions and scientific data centers.

To find out more about iPres 2010, visit www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp/ipres2010/index.html

The event  includes a wide array of informative education sessions, pre-conference programs, tours of local repositories, special events, exhibits, and networking opportunities.  To find out more or to register online visit, www.archivists.org/conference/

Oxford, UK | 28 April 2010. Today, Tessella, the information technology and consulting services company selected by R&D, science and engineering leaders for business-critical assignments, launches version of 4 of Tessella Safety Deposit Box (SDB4) at the 8th European Conference on Digital Archiving in Geneva, Switzerland.

The technology helps memory institutions (including libraries and archives), who are already skilled at preserving paper material; face the problems posed by preserving material stored in digital formats. Version 4 provides the architecture and functions to deliver a multi-tenant digital archiving solution that can support small local archives through to large national systems. Key to this is a flexible workflow engine which allows customers an easy way to configure their own ingest, data management, access and preservation and processes.

Ann Keen, archiving account director, at Tessella said: “We believe that multi-tenant facilities are going to be increasingly important in future digital archiving solutions. The recent selection by the Austrian Federal Chancellery of Siemens IT Solutions and Services and Tessella SDB to develop the Austrian State e-government Archives validates this point of view”.

Jon Tilbury, director at Tessella added: “We believe that working in partnership is hugely important to the success of SDB. SDB continues to be the archive of choice for advanced long-term archiving and the SDB User Group has really helped set product direction”.

The SDB User Group now compromises 9 flagship organisations: UK National Archives, Swiss Federal Archives, Malaysian National Archives, Dutch National Archives, Rotterdam Regional Archives, the British Library, Wellcome Trust Libraries, Estonian Archives and The Austrian Federal Chancellery.

SDB was developed out of work done in partnership with The National Archives of the UK to help confront the problem of digital preservation. The software, which has already been in use at The National Archives for over six years as the basis of their award-winning Digital Archive system, has been significantly enhanced as part of The National Archives’ Seamless Flow programme.

- Ends -

Notes to the editor

About Tessella
For decades, Tessella has been successfully delivering IT and consulting services to world leaders in R&D, science and engineering. We enable our clients in life sciences, energy, the public sector, and consumer industries to achieve a wide range of objectives, including, forecasting floods, developing fusion power, enhancing military sensor capability, improving drug discovery and development efficiency, and reducing risk to health and the environment in the extraction and production of oil and gas. With offices in Europe and North America, global companies rely on Tessella for business critical assignments.

For further information visit our dedicated microsite on http://www.digital-preservation.com/

Media Contact
Tessella
Christina Tealdi
PR/AR Executive
Phone: +44 (0) 1235 555511 | Mobile: + 44 (0) 779 9346453

christina.tealdi@tessella.com