Europa reports that tools developed in the CASPAR project using EU funds are now available in the form of open source software. CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval) involved researchers from the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Israel, Italy and the UK.

Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes said: "Digital information is extremely vulnerable and also extremely valuable. Anyone who has lost access to family photos or old documents will know the frustration of dealing with incompatible technologies. I am very excited by the potential of CASPAR's tools and techniques to ensure sustained quality of and access to valuable data in the future."

Digital technology has revolutionised the way we deal with knowledge and information. With the evolution of data recording technologies, from punch cards and magnetic tapes to cloud computing on huge servers, the ability to access and understand information in the future in a landscape of evolving technologies remains crucial. Huge amounts of vastly different information are encoded digitally.

CASPAR addresses a very wide range of issues surrounding the preservation of all types of digitally encoded information and how it could be used in the future. These methods have been tested successfully with different kinds of data from science, cultural heritage and contemporary performing arts.

The CASPAR open source software is available for free download and for further development into commercial applications from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/digitalpreserve/files/

For further details on the CASPAR project, see: http://www.casparpreserves.eu/

For the Europa press release see: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/10/1094&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en