Within the context of the ‘Digitising Contemporary Art’ project, LIMA developed and completed the best practices report, offcialy called deliverable, which focuses on bit preservation, i.e., the physical storage of the data and how today's institutes and companies store their collections of data. It gives an overview of storage media types and systems available for creating a good storage infrastructure. Each storage type is explained in terms of its properties and what advantages and risks the system gives in view of long-term preservation.

‘Digitising Contemporary Art’ is a European project which aims to digitise contemporary art objects from 12 European countries and make them accessible to the wider public through Europeana – a single access point for European cultural heritage. The best practices, in full length ‘D6.2 Best practices for a digital storage infrastructure for the long-term preservation of digital files’, can be used as a guideline for those in charge of maintaining contemporary art collections and digital archives, when purchasing new equipment or constructing a preservation plan. Storage is defined in this deliverable as a hardware medium onto which one can store digital content. In more strict preservation terms a digital storage infrastructure for long-term preservation can be seen as the Archival Storage entity in the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) model.

This deliverable was added to the DCA project along with another deliverable ‘D5.4 Semantic dissemination to Europeana’. In addition, the D6.2 deliverable has been tested by LIMA with the use of the Scoremodel*. This online model, developed by DEN (NL) and Packed (NL), guides organisations working with digital sustainability through possible risks and threats within their organisations.

The entire overview of all the deliverables, background information about the DCA project and its partners is presented at the DCA project website. The project, which started on January 1, 2011 and lasted nearly two and a half years, has reached it’s final stage in July 2013.