Page 27 - Building Digital Libraries

CHAPTER 1

is important to be aware of the problems the standards are designed to help
you address, but don’t let them derail your repository project. None of these
standards addresses critical issues such as:

• How to ingest resources
• How to assign consistent and complete descriptive,
structural, technical, and administrative metadata
• System behavior for objects or metadata

In other words, those standards do not address the most important aspect
of your repository—namely, the user needs it is designed to address. These
standards only help with preservation, and even then only in an abstract way.
As of this writing, most open source and commercially available plat-
forms are not OAIS-compliant. This does not mean that libraries should
avoid these platforms. Rather, it means that your repository plan should be
built around actual needs, and you shouldn’t let your process get bogged
down in a set of requirements defined for another purpose. Your repository
will be successful if the users can interact with resources the way they need
to, and you have the capability to migrate the objects and metadata neces-
sary to use those resources to another platform.

Resources

OAIS: https://public.ccsds.org/pubs/650x0m2.pdf
PREMIS: www.loc.gov/standards/premis/index.html
DRAMBORA: www.repositoryaudit.eu/participate/
TDR: https://www.crl.edu/archiving-preservation/digital-archives/
metrics-assessing-and-certifying/is016363

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