Comments on: What repositories do: The OAIS model http://everybodyslibraries.com/2008/10/13/what-repositories-do-the-oais-model/ Libraries for everyone, by everyone, shared with everyone, about everything Wed, 16 May 2012 13:53:05 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Steve Hitchcock http://everybodyslibraries.com/2008/10/13/what-repositories-do-the-oais-model/#comment-268 Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:06:15 +0000 http://everybodyslibraries.wordpress.com/?p=210#comment-268 John, You are on the right track in your efforts to make OAIS more approachable for repositories. I’m not sure that your description is simple enough, even now. I’ve presented on digital preservation to repository managers in the UK as part of the Repositories Support Project. On the first occasion I put up an untitled slide on OAIS and asked who knew what it was. Not one hand went up. Further presentations tell me that for non-specialists you can’t make digital preservation simple enough. I can’t fault the level of interest of my audiences and their willingness to participate in practical work, but I always end up asking myself if I have given them enough to go away with and act on for their repositories, and the answer, however hard I try to focus on the basics, is probably not enough.

The other problem, as you say, is there are various kinds of repositories. Repositories are not well defined yet are still evolving, towards more service-oriented architectures, ‘cloud’ services, etc. This evolution is in its early stages. Although it is possible to apply OAIS to these architectures in principle, how effective it will be in practice at enabling repositories to plan and manage preservation requirements given the prospect of multiple, interacting and overlapping services and providers is harder to gauge.

I believe it will continue to be the case for the time being that IT development will be driven by new technology and applications rather than the needs of preservation, and as a result preservation approaches will necessarily have to be reactive. In the case of repositories, we will have to fit OAIS analyses to emerging architectures, when we can see more clearly what these are, rather than expect it to happen the other way round.

]]> By: Chris Rusbridge http://everybodyslibraries.com/2008/10/13/what-repositories-do-the-oais-model/#comment-256 Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:32:40 +0000 http://everybodyslibraries.wordpress.com/?p=210#comment-256 Nice post, thanks John. A couple of comments may be worth making. First, as you mentioned, OAIS is undergoing review at the moment; a process that does appear to be taking an inordinately long time, and unfortunately does not appear to be marked by the same openness. I’ve written about this at http://digitalcuration.blogspot.com/2008/09/oais-revision-moving-forward.html. The good news is that we now do have some responses to our comments, and the original group that commented will get a chance to have a look at those responses in the next month or so. The revisers think they will have a new draft for consultation early next year. It’s important, I’d ask people to look out for it, and get involved in improving it.

Second is much more sobering. A couple of times recently I’ve asked groups involved in repositories their views on the applicability of OAIS, eg in a discussion in JISC using the Ideascale system, see http://jiscrepository.ideascale.com/akira/dtd/2276-784. The participants are intelligent people with a good knowledge of repositories, and they voted 16 to 3 AGAINST the idea that “The repository should be a full OAIS preservation system”. I’m not sure what this means! I did get them to vote 13 to 1 in favour of the idea that “Repository should aspire to make contents accessible and usable over the medium term”, see http://jiscrepository.ideascale.com/akira/dtd/2643-784. But it seems pretty clear that repository managers quite distrust the OAIS model. Interesting, no?

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