Digital archiving of specific scientific information in the Czech Republic

Abstract

This paper deals with a description of activities in the Czech Republic related to digital archiving. First of all the general situation in the field is described in order to give insight in the state of art in the field in the Czech Republic. The key part of this paper deals with a description of the design and implementation of a pilot system that should serve for digital archiving of scientific information of certain kind - MSc and PhD theses at Czech Technical University in Prague. One of the reasons for archiving of this type of information was the fact that these theses contain information about scientific and technological developments in a given period of time. Such information might be widely appreciated in future by historians who will investigate the history of science and technology of a certain period of time. The research is oriented towards robust archiving systems that can be used in small-scale applications. These small systems do not offer universal solutions in the field of digital archiving - they solve problems that become urgent in various applications: to save current digital documents in the form that could be transferable to general archiving systems developed later. The described implementation is a pilot practical solution to this problem. The approach described in the paper will allow the user to archive also documents that contain non-textual information.