Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
16.1 Key Preservation Components and Infrastructure
When thinking about what tools and services are needed to help us with preserva-
tion, we should consider how to deal with all the types of digital objects discussed
in
Chap. 4
, without having to tailor software for each. Identifying commonalities
allows us to share the cost of such tools and services - remember one of the key
disincentives is cost.
One way of doing this is to distinguish between those things which can be used
for many different types of digitally encoded information and those things which
are closely tied to the specific type of digital object. The former we shall refer to
as domain independent while the latter we will refer to as domain dependent. We
use the term “domain” (or sometimes “discipline”) because it is then easier to map
to the real world, instead of having to think about different digital object types.
Each domain will tend to use many different digital object types, and there will
be overlaps although often with a different focus, nevertheless people tend to think
about their own domain of work rather than their digital object types.
Since one tends to refer to tools which can be used for many different kinds
of things as infrastructure we shall often use the term “domain independent
infrastructure” or simply “infrastructure”.
To make the distinction we can examine the issues from several angles, making
use of the diagrams we have discussed earlier.
Figure
16.1
, which was briefly introduced in
Sect. 6.5
, and the associated table,
pick out the main components, following the lifecycle of a piece of digitally encoded
Fig. 16.1
CASPAR information flow architecture
