The French Government is launching work on its VITAM project today, named after the interministerial platform designed to archive the Administration’s electronic documents. Developed in open source, the programme will first concern three ministries for whom archiving issues are of particular importance: Defence, Foreign Affairs and Culture.
In a recent article, the NextInpact website echoed the Government’s choice of an open source solution for the issue of the conservation of all that data over time, whether for practical, legal or historical reasons. In a context in which the Administration is producing more and more documents using IT tools, the scope of this challenge will only continue to grow.
“In the past, to archive its digital documents the Central Administration relied on classic conservation techniques, scaled for strictly moderate volumes. With the exponential growth in documents created directly in digital form, this situation is becoming increasing untenable”,relates a source close to the project.
Since 2011, archivists and computer scientists at the Ministries of Defence, Culture and Foreign Affairs have been examining the possibility of a shared archiving solution. A few days ago, Ministers Fleur Pellerin and Thierry Mandon attended the official launch of work on VITAM, which in French stands for “intangible values transmitted to archives for the record”. The goal of the project is to develop an open source platform that can subsequently be adapted to each ministry’s needs and practices and to the legal framework governing documentation.
The programme focuses on the development of a computerized management solution that is independent of the technical production infrastructure. More specifically, the solution will “carry out indexing, metadata management, storage, file durability and, of course, search functions”.
The project will be “developed in open source mode, meaning the VITAM platform will provide open interfaces (or APIs). The goal is for it to integrate as easily as possible with the different software in use at the ministries: messaging systems, HRIS, administrative intelligence applications, and so on”.
A team of five will be responsible for the project’s progress, with the first tangible results expected in the second half of next year. A €15 million budget will be allocated to the various invitations to tender that will be launched throughout that period. In the same spirit as the open source software platform that is available to the ministries as part of the modernization of the State’s information systems, VITAM should prevent each ministry having to build its own archiving solution. A study initiated by the Ministries of Defence, Foreign Affairs and Culture was conducted in 2013 and 2014, with the aim of establishing proof of concept on the basis of limited (messaging) data. That study is available here (in French).
Source: http://www.nextinpact.com