The Biblioteca de Catalunya and the Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya have created the Curator Archiving Tool (CAT), a new software to web archives

28-09-2010

The new software developed by the Biblioteca de Catalunya (BC) and the Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya (CESCA) has been informed at an international meeting in Vienna

Staff members of the Biblioteca de Catalunya (BC), coordinator of PADICAT, and the Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya (CESCA), technological partner, have informed the international community about the development of a new open source software tool created to improve several processes of the digital repositories that form web archives.

The new software, CAT (Curator Archiving Tool) has been disseminated through a technical report at the annual meeting of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), that took place in Vienna on september 2010 within the framework of the seventh edition of the International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES2010).

CAT (Curator Archiving Tool) is a new software composed by three modules aimed to managing the processes of human cataloguing of the digital resources deposited in web archives like PADICAT, to publish the digital resources in directories and special collections and to offer statistical information of added value to end users. The report shows the advances of this new IT tool and the philosophy that has motivated his design.

With the CAT, PADICAT will contribute to the improvement and IT development of the open source software that the most of web archives use, digital repositories aimed to the digital preservation of all that is published on the Internet.

In September, 2010, PADICAT offers open access to 53.249 crawls from 30.481 web sites and keep cooperation agreements with 442 entities of all kind. With the aim to guarantee the permanent access to a sample of all that is been published on the Internet in Catalonia, the harvesting engines of this pioneering repository have begun to compile a selection of web sites from the current electoral campaign to the Catalan Parliament, as they have already done previously with all the electoral campaigns on the Internet since 2006.