As far as ancient archives are concerned, the key issue for Cambodian documents, both in Cambodia and abroad, is their preservation and conservation, so that these written, painted, and to some extent printed treasures be protected from natural alteration, decomposition or simply destruction.

Of course, physical, chemical and biological conservation and restoration programmes have been undertaken long ago. But in the 1970 s. the activities of the Buddhist Institute were curtailed due to the war and they could be restarted only in 1992. Moreover restoration campaigns constitute long term and expensive operations limited to a restricted number of pieces because of the costs they generate.

The present project aims at preserving the archives, if not physically, at least their content and their image by digitisation (like Scanning, digital camera and digitisation of microfilm). The second objective is to share the digitised archive material so that everyone enjoys a free access on an open Asian Archive Library. This can only further international scholarly exchanges as well as cross-checking of otherwise ignored or isolated sources.

In the same spirit a couple of generations ago, several campaigns of archive microfilming were launched successfully. But those microfilm collections are not exhaustive, not easily accessible, sometimes deteriorated. The second difference with past microfilm operations and not the least is the principle to give a free and easy access to the digitised material.

The ambition of the present project is to reach both objectives. More specifically, the get-in-touch keep-in-touch phase will consist into gathering all over EU and Asia the present status of best advanced technologies in order to address these two issues.

• Transfer of technology in the process of Archive digitisation/ Archive electronic management
• Transfer of technology in the field of open archive library

Inventory of the present needs and specifics issues of Libraries in Asia Reviewing priorities, needs and issues in Cambodian Archive library as regard to rescuing by digitisation most exposed archives.

• Adjusting technical solutions to the special case of Asian context

Identifying most advanced electronic document management technologies / metadata / automatic generation of archive catalogue/ Archive data base and catalogue methodology/ creation of Thesaurus.

Other issue related to Asian archive context:

• reviewing the best technique in the field of processing various policies of characters (namely chinese, devanagari and latin)

Identifying most advanced technology of open library of digitised archives:

• reviewing the best technique in order to offer a multilingual access / multi-policies of characters)
• Special Asian context: The website accessible to Asian languages
• Other activity related to the open access to the open library

Disseminating the project to other Asian and EU interested libraries.
Examining various juridical problems like ‘Intellectual property’ rights, authoring.
Linking with EU and worldwide association of National libraries in order to use the same standards and benefit of mutual exchange in terms of content resources.