Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale (FRD)
The Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale (FRD) “Digital Renaissance – New Technologies for Culture Heritage” Foundation seeks to promote, on a high quality standard, the application of new information and communication technologies to increase the value of cultural heritage through initiatives in research, consultancy, documentation, promotion, education and dissemination, and in collaboration with other institutions. In particular the main sectors of intervention are connected with the production, accessibility, and preservation of digital resources.
FRD since 2005 has supported some strategic projects on digital memory preservation for a total amount of co-funding of around 1.1 M€ per year. Currently FRD coordinates and participates in 8 projects on R&D focussing on digital preservation and related issues. A FRD key objective is to work towards the creation of wide consensus and community building on digital preservation related issues at national and international level. At national level FRD is supporting the establishing of an Italian network, involving different actors engaged in digital memory preservation, like cultural institutions, e-government bodies, research communities, industry, and multimedia content producers. At international level FRD has participated in the Digital Preservation Europe (DPE) Coordination Action focussing primarily on community building, training and dissemination activities, in strict cooperation with CASPAR and PLANETS under the so called ‘We preserve’ initiative. Moreover FRD has been involved in other EU projects like Vidi-VIDEO and Interedition Cost action. FRD has also cooperated with PRESTOSpace, DELOS, MINERVA and it is Associated Partner of Europeana and DARIAH. Participation of FRD in APARSEN will provide the project with the competences obtained in linking e-infrastructures and the cultural heritage domain.
Among all the ongoing initiatives, the leading project is “Digital Stacks”, a new OAIS based service for the legal deposit of digital contents. It aims at setting up an infrastructure based on a redundancy infrastructure following the trusted digital repositories audit like DRAMBORA. FRD is involved in the development of the National Bibliography Number (NBN) service in Italy through the implementation of the jNBN open source software, already usable with EUPL licence. FRD is also involved in the IETF Group for the review of the URN namespace standards as NBN, ISBN, ISSN. The project will benefit from the experience acquired from FRD in the implementation and management of infrastructures for the long term preservation of digital contents and the ongoing involvement in Persistent Identifiers research.
Recently FRD has been nominated member of the PREMIS Editorial Committee and is supporting the Italian PREMIS testbed in collaboration with Library of Congress. FRD has collaborated to the production of technical guidelines aimed at creating a map of risks for sound and musical archives in Italy for the IASA (International Association of Sound Archives).
FRD provides high level training and e-learning courses to facilitate the best use of new technologies in particular in the cultural heritage domain.
The competencies acquired under the PREMIS Group and the experiences developed in national projects can find a useful application in the framework of common standards and technologies planned in APARSEN. Also the significant experiences acquired from FRD in developing high level courses and training activities on digital preservation, will be of great support for the development of APARSEN training courses, workshop and symposia.
