Data Grids for Conservation of Cultural Inheritance Antonio S. Calanducci INFN Catania Roberto Barbera INFN Catania, COMETA Consortium, Università di Catania Jorge Sevilla Cedillo INFN Catania Via S.Sofia, 64 - 95128 Catania (Italy), +39 095 378 5519 antonio.calanducci@ct.infn.it roberto.barbera@ct.infn.it jorgesece@gmail.com Alessandro De Filippo Monica Saso Stefania Iannizzotto Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università di Catania Piazza Dante, 32 - 95124 Catania (Italy), +39 095 317967 lebeulme@gmail.com monicasaso@gmail.com stefania.iannizzotto@gmail.com Francesco De Mattia Conservatorio di Parma, ASTRA Project Via del Conservatorio, 27/A, 43100 Parma +39 0521 381911 Domenico Vicinanza Delivery Advanced Network Technology to Europe UK, ASTRA Project City House 126-130 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 1PQ +44 1223 371300 francesco.demattia@conservatorio.pr.it domenico.vicinanza@dante.org.uk ABSTRACT Data Grids offer redundant and huge distributed storage capabilities, providing an ideal and secure place for the long- term preservation of digitized literary works and documents of artistic and historical relevance. In fact, digitization has been progressively used as a means for avoiding the loss of literary heritage on paper, caused by physical ageing and the environmental conditions in which documents are kept. Document consultation is another problem that leads to additional deterioration. Multiple copies of high resolutions scans stored in a distributed environment and made available for consultation with a easy to use interface is a means to guarantee conservation of cultural heritage. Grid authentication and authorisation mechanisms allow a fine- grained access to archives by single users, groups or entire communities. Moreover, metadata services permit a structured organisation of scanned files for quick searches. Two use cases have been considered to demonstrate how grid digital libraries can guarantee enduring preservation of literary heritage: the archives of the work of Italian writer Federico De Roberto, made up of almost 8000 scans, and the musical and the musical archives of the “Civiltà Musicale Napoletana” project, made up of more than 250,000 digitizations. A working prototype of the De Roberto digital repository has been implemented on the gLibrary platform, a grid-based system to host and manage digital libraries developed by INFN Catania, on the Sicilian e-infrastructure of the COMETA consortium. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.7 [Digital Libraries] J.5 [Arts and Humanities]: Literature General Terms Documentation, Standardization Keywords Cultural Heritage, Data Availability, Data Preservation, Digital Libraries, Federico De Roberto, Grid Computing 1. INTRODUCTION Traditionally, the main goal of libraries, archives, and museums has been to preserve and spread the knowledge and the cultural heritage. Today, this really important function can take advantage of the development of digital technologies. In fact, digitization allows avoiding deterioration phenomena of original copies, caused by the handling of physical material, creating an accurate reproduction of the original ones, ensuring the usability of the contents and improving the access to documents such as books, manuscripts, parchments, leaflets, cartographies, musical scores, photos, paintings, videos, audios and three-dimensional objects. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. DaGreS’09, May 18–20, 2009, Ischia, Italy. Copyright 2009 ACM 978-1-60558-555-0/09/05...$5.00.