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Repository should aspire to make contents accessible and usable over the medium term
A repository should be for content which is required and expected to be useful over a significant period. It may host more transient content, but by and large the point of a repository is persistence. While suggesting a repository should be a "full OAIS" has not proved acceptable to this group so far, investment in a repository and this need for persistence suggest that repository managers should aim to make their content both accessible and usable over the medium (rather than short) term. For the purposes of this exercise, let's suggest factors of around 3: short term 3 years, medium term around 10 years, long term around 30 years plus. Ten years is a reasonable period to aspire to; it justifies investment, but is unlikely to cover too many major content migrations.

To achieve this, I think repository management should assess their repository and its policies. Using OAIS at a high level as a yard stick would be appropriate. Full compliance would not be required, but thought to each major concept and element would be good practice.

This "idea" is to replace the "full OAIS" approach with something more realistic and achievable.
Comments
s.meece 1 year ago
"While suggesting a repository should be a "full OAIS" has not proved acceptable to this group so far"

I don't understand what 'full OAIS' means. I might vote it up if I understood it.
c.rusbridge 1 year ago
Good point, and I'm guilty of a bad case of jargon, my apologies. An OAIS is an Open Archival Information System, and is the technical name devised for a repository and services designed to support long term preservation, where "long term" means long enough for things like technological change, format obsolescence, and changes in terminology or knowledge base of the so-called "designated community" (ie the community that the OAIS serves) to become significant. It is described in an ISO standard, but it would usually be cited in its openly available form:

CCSDS (2002) Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS). IN CCSDS (Ed.), NASA. http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0b1.pdf

The problem is partly that if you commit to long term preservation and making your repository a "full OAIS" in this way, you may be increasing the cost of running the repository by significant amounts. There is also controversy over the extent to which the standard is merely a reference model (as it claims) that can be broadly interpreted so that even activities like data archives that have been in operation decades before the standard came into existence can comply with, versus a more prescriptive interpretation that some of the detailed parts of the standard seem to imply.

What I'm trying to say here is that a repository worthy of the name needs to think at least medium term, and therefore needs to think about the issues raised in the standard, without necessarily aiming for full compliance. Complete rejection of the implications of the medium and long term should not be an option!
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