The majority of new material published today is created in digital format, and much of it remains exclusively digital. Additionally, a great amount of older material that was not created in digital format is undergoing digitization to allow for better conservation and accessibility.

Tasked with preserving cumulative knowledge, libraries and other memory institutions around the world are taking an increasingly proactive approach to the preservation of digital information. To help these institutions fulfill their mission and ensure that scholarship and heritage continue to be accessible now and in the future, Rosetta from Ex Libris provides a highly scalable, secure, and easily managed digital preservation system.

The Digital Preservation Challenge

• Scale: With the tremendous increase in electronically generated and digitized material over the past decade, the collections of academic and national libraries contain many millions of digital items, including digitized prints, electronic articles, audiovisuals, and Web sites.
  
  
• Life cycle: The ease with which electronic resources can be updated results in shorter information life cycles. A digital preservation system must therefore support the timely ingest of new material, as well as the management of different versions of the material.
  
  
• Format: As digital formats continue to change, institutions must ensure that digital content is preserved so that it can be viewed, listened to, and explored in the future, even if the original technology becomes obsolete.
  

The Ex Libris Solution: Connecting Past, Present, and Future

Designed in collaboration with the National Library of New Zealand and reviewed by an international peer group of recognized leaders and innovators, Ex Libris Rosetta enables institutions to preserve and provide access to the collections in their care, now and in the future.

• Scalable: Built on a distributed architecture that can support multiple, flexible server configurations, the system can scale up to manage digital collections of any size. By separating the permanent and working repositories, the system offers the security and redundancy required to keep collections safe.
  
  
• Expandable:  Ex Libris Rosetta supports the functional needs of institutions that receive vast numbers of digital items on an ongoing basis. Batch loads, staging areas, and multiple deposit hierarchies enable users to manage the ingestion of new material efficiently and effectively.
  
  
• Flexible: Easy setup options allow institutions to configure the system to support their unique requirements and adhere to governing bodies’ guidelines.
  
  
• Standards-based: Based on the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model and conforming to trusted digital repository (TDR) requirements, the system provides institutions with the infrastructure and technology needed to preserve and facilitate access to the digital collections under their guardianship.
  
  
• Accessible: Preserved digital entities are delivered via viewers that are compatible with the constantly evolving format types and are supplied as part of the system and third-party applications. With built-in integration capabilities, the system can accept delivery requests from discovery and delivery applications such as the Ex Libris Primo® solution while ensuring that item-level access rights are enforced.