Vitam
Description
VITAM is a digital archiving and preservation Software solution. It ensures ingest, management, preservation, storage and long-term access to large amount of digital records of administrative as well as archival value. It applies for every digital document type: text, audio, video, pictures, maps, database...
VITAM is a back-end. It can be easily integrated by REST API within archives services’ business applications and software solutions.
Provider
VITAM is a French governmental project. It is backed and financed by French Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Culture and Defense. This 3 agencies use VITAM in order to build their own digital archival system. Seven others partners (public agencies and ministries) also join the project to implement VITAM.
VITAM is built by a plural and inter-departmental Team archivists/IT professionals.
Development
VITAM Software Solution is developed in Agile methodologies.
VITAM Agile manifest is “For public agencies, In order to provide long term access to their digital information, VITAM proposes a free archiving software, scalable, simple and easy to interface and integrate, Which permits an unitary and secured management of billion objects, And targets its adoption by the largest number of public agencies.”
VITAM only includes open source softwares compatible with GPL V3 and is published under GPL V3.
- Releases (code) are published every 3 to 4 months on GITHUB: https://github.com/ProgrammeVitam/vitam.
- Installation packages (CentOS and Debian) are available on Ressources Page: http://www.programmevitam.fr/pages/ressources/
- Current Version is 1.4.1 (Release 7)
VITAM is based on a Micro services Architecture, to ease addition or replacement of components.
Functionalities
Vitam’s functionalities are splitted between OAIS six functional entities:
- Ingest,
- Archival Storage,
- Data Management,
- Administration (functionnal and technical),
- Preservation planning,
- Access.
According to the French context, the OAIS functional model has been adapted to fit exactly very specific needs (linked to records management and archives). A specific feature named “AIP lifecycle management” has been added, gathering some other activities linked to the data lifecycle management and final disposition implementations. It allowed to add features such as metadata update and modification, arrangement, declassification, transfer to another digital repository.