Rapporto Tecnico, Anno 7, n° 42 maggio 2012

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Introduction

The Ceris-CNR project of digital preservation infrastructure has been committed by Bess (Social
Science Electronic Library of Piemonte) for years 2011-2012.
Bess is a group of eighteen socioeconomic libraries in Piemonte (Italy) included Ceris-CNR
library, they share a common specialization even if they are private foundations, research
institutes, and university libraries that means different libraries in terms of size, parent
institution, purpose, financial endowment, as well as collections.
One of the initiative promoted by Bess and sponsored by Compagnia di San Paolo of Turin, is
the creation of a digital repository of sources of Piedmontese society and economy.
Bess has set up a digitalization laboratory, to be directly used by the members, for the
conservation and preservation of collections included out of print and gray literature materials;
External partners are welcome to digitalize and share their archives, Istituto Gramsci for
example has licensed “Sisifo” review that is now accessible through Bess archive and other
institutions has agree to share some collections yet.
The resulting repository will serve as a source of regional and economic information to the
whole community.
Ceris-CNR role is to handle all the post-scan of the digitalization, for the end of the two years’
project, we planned to have 5.000 items so Ceris-CNR had to provide for the management of
large volumes of data with the availability of space storage for the digitized works with
characteristics of stability, versatility and dynamism.
Ceris-CNR has deployed the software and server platforms of the repository, in a virtualized and
redundant infrastructure and also take care of the design, development and management of the
web portal (front-end) for the presentation, research and consulting data of the digitalized items.
Here listed some evidence of numbers, hardware and software used, most of the aspects will
be analyzed in this paper:
• 5000 digitalized items at the end of the project
• files: pdf/a, high resolution tiff, txt file
• Dublin Core metadata
• 14 TB disk space at disposal
• 2-node active/passive open-source cluster
• High Availabilty Hypervisor using cluster storage
• repository: Fedora Commons
• harvesting OAI-PMH
• scripting for ingesting
• Custom models and datastreams
• Islandora
• front-end server: Drupal
• Solr - search platform from the Apache Lucene project
An analogue project is taking place at another CNR institute: ISMAR - Venice is setting up a
digital repository for its historical librarian heritage (http://biblio1.ve.ismar.cnr.it/fedora/repository)
following up all the listed steps.
In this case the resources consist in different typologies: books, manuscripts, journals and maps
from 16th to 20th centuries.
As a consequence there will be some different features in managing collections and in the
output structure.
The open-source community helped us to build on our project and this paper is our thanks, of
course at disposal of the open-source community.

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