Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The current custodian of the data, whether
an organisation or project, may cease to
exist at some point in the future
Brokering of organisations to hold data and the
ability to package together the information
needed to transfer information between
organisations ready for long term preservation
The ones we trust to look after the digital
holdings may let us down
Certification process so that one can have
confidence about whom to trust to preserve
data holdings over the long term (see
Chap.
25
)
24.2 Possible Financial Infrastructure Concepts
and Components
It seems difficult describe an explicit business model, and indeed there may be
different business models at different phases; for example one might distinguish
(1) prototype (2) emerging infrastructure for early adopters and (3) a long-lived
infrastructure to rely on. Certainly phase (1) would need specific funding and a num-
ber of the technical components described below have been prototyped in a variety
of EU projects. For phase (2) it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the short to
medium term funding to go from prototype to stable, robust and scalable infrastruc-
ture components must be provided by the EU in the first instance, together perhaps
with major stakeholders such as the members of the Alliance for Permanent Access.
The longer term business model needed for phase (3) must clearly be linked to the
business models for the rest of the infrastructure on which the components described
here depend, for example the basic network.
It is worth making a number of observations, for example that there is also
significant commercial need for digital preservation, although this tends not to
be for the indefinite future, there may be options to create a self-funding set of
services, especially where the service does not scale with the amount of data need-
ing preservation. The Registry of Representation Information, the Knowledge gap
manager, the Authenticity tools, the licence tool dark archive, the brokerage sys-
tems and the certification system, to name a few, do not necessarily suffer the
problem of scaling with the amount of information being preserved. For example
one piece of Representation Information may be used to describe 1 billion data
objects.
A Storage Facility on the other hand would grow with data growth, although
the declining cost of storage means that this does not imply a simple linear cost
relationship. Nevertheless such a facility may be able to supply added value services
such as disaster recovery and integrity checking.
Cost/benefit analyses are likely to be very highly instance specific yet some com-
mon models are essential if judgments are to be made about what can be afforded.
