The goal of the E-ARK Project is to pilot archival services to keep records authentic and usable based on current best-practices. These will address the three main endeavours of an archive – acquiring, preserving and enabling re-use of information. E-ARK will demonstrate the potential benefits for public administrations, public agencies, public services, citizens and business by providing easy and efficient access to the archived records.The project brings together a core group of European national archives, four leading research institutions, three providers of archiving software solutions and services, two government agencies, and two international membership organisations that represent the communities who stand to benefit from the project: data owners/providers, archives, software vendors and solution providers.E-ARK will, over a three year period, harmonise archival processes at a pan-European level supported by guidelines and recommended practices that will cater for a range of data from different types of source including record management systems and databases.The key objective is to provide one common, robust approach that is replicable and scalable to meet the needs of many kinds of organisations, public and private, large and small, and able to support complex data types such as web pages and geo-data. The project will be public-facing, providing a fully operational service and access to information for its users, taking account of all legal constraints.The practices developed within the project will reduce the risk of information loss due to unsuitable approaches to keeping and archiving of records. Being generic and scalable, the project results could be applied to build an e-archival infrastructure across the EU and in environments where different legal systems and records management traditions apply.