The development of RODA started in 2006. At an early stage the project was sponsored by the Directorate-General of Portuguese Archives (DGARQ) and financially supported by the Community Support Framework - POAP (grant agreement no 000613/2006/111). The initial purpose of the project was to build a functioning prototype of a digital repository that would lead to more concrete ideas and knowledge on how to build an operational digital preservation repository for DGARQ.

A second phase financially supported by DGARQ consisted of the development of a production-ready repository according to the requirements identified during the prototyping phase. The repository went live in 2008 hosted by DGARQ itself. Between 2011 and 2014, the software continued to be developed under the wing of the SCAPE project co-funded by KEEP SOLUTIONS and the European Commission under the 7th Framework Program (grant agreement no 270137). During this period the software was enhanced with new and improved APIs, as well as new functionality to make it more capable of coping with large-scale environments.

Between 2014 and 2016 the RODA project has received financial and technical support from the E-ARK project (co-funded by KEEP SOLUTIONS and the European Commission Competiveness and Innovation Framework Programme, grant agreement no 620998). In this project RODA has been enhanced to support the E-ARK Information Packages’ specifications and the archival workflows pushed forward by the project.

In 2015, the software received additional funding from the Directorate-General of the Book, of Archives and of Libraries (DGLAB, formally known as DGARQ), also supported by Compete 2020 national funding scheme, to develop a second version of the software with enhanced features all around (e.g. improved ingest workflows, risk management support, custom descriptive metadata schemas, faster discovery functionalities, representation information, among other features), which were included in the release of RODA 3.

In 2020, the Swedish Customs (Tullverket) sponsored the development of retention and disposal features in RODA, aligned with MoReq2010 standard requirements, as well as their own requirements. These features were released as part of RODA 4 in March 2021.

Between 2021-2022, DGLAB again sponsored the developments of several new features in RODA, integrated in their Distributed Digital Preservation project. These features included support for binaries as reference (shallow SIP and AIP), authentication with JWT access tokens, and sincronization between RODA instances that act as agents and a RODA instance that acts like central which can control the preservation planning functions of the RODA agents. These features were released as part of RODA 5 in March 2023.

Special thanks

Throughout the years, RODA has received contributions from various individuals that have enhanced the product in many different ways (ideas, bug fixes, features, translations, etc.). Special thanks goes to José Carlos Ramalho from the University of Minho for his contribution to the body of knowledge that instigated the development of RODA, Vladislav Korecký from Gordic for translating RODA 1.0 into Czech and funding the support for the Czech SIP format, Miguel Coutada, Masters student, for its developments on the Digital Preservation Toolkit, David Giaretta and Neil Beagrie for their insights on ISO 14721 and ISO 16363, Fulgencio Sanmartin from the European Publications Office for his innovative ideas on risk management, Daniel Cáceres, Masters student, for translating RODA into Spanish, WhiteRed for translating RODA into Swedish, Panka Dióssy for translating RODA into Hungarian, and all others that have directly or indirectly supported the project over the years.