The “Philippus Corts Foundation” (outside the Netherlands “The Corts Foundation”) focuses on the Dutch past in East and Southeast Asia. One of the foundation’s projects is the sustainable digital preservation of VOC archives at ANRI, Indonesia’s national archive. At stake are as many as ten million pages of unique documents, providing insight into daily life in Batavia and Far Eastern trade relations in the 17th century.

Scan

Although the archive is kept under reasonable conditions, the ravages of time still do their devastating work. High time to digitize these historically very important documents. A task that The Corts Foundation undertook. Storage of the scans was initially done in temporary storage to get the work process going. Experts at the foundation knew even then that this method would not be qualitatively and quantitatively adequate for final storage. And that had to be done right, because the scanning was done once and security had to be guaranteed.

Solution

The task was to provide a storage system that would last longer, be guaranteed to last longer with long service contracts, so in this case The Corts Foundation was assured of long-term, secure storage. The Silent Cubes brought the solution. Silent Cubes provide revision-safe, quadruple-redundant, energy-efficient WORM storage for long-term archiving. The system is tied to the infrastructure via Ethernet as a NAS unit and can be expanded very flexibly due to its modular design.

Local partner

The system in Indonesia is under the control of Comex. The capable people of the ICT department of the ‘Arsip Nasional’ and others involved were trained and informed about the technical background of the system. Any malfunctions come in to Comex; a local partner in Indonesia can resolve minor malfunctions. In addition, the system administrator and manufacturer are informed, which puts troubleshooting into a broader perspective.

If you would like to read the entire article on the storage of VOC archives, click here