Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 25
Who Is Doing a Good Job? Audit
and Certification
By the CCSDS/ISO RAC working group, led by David Giaretta
Comradeship and trust will emerge naturally when discipline and high standards
are enforced.
(
Tao Zhu Gong
)
25.1 Background
The Preserving Digital Information report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital
Information [
242
] declared,
•
a critical component of digital archiving infrastructure is the existence of a
sufficient number of trusted organizations capable of storing, migrating, and
providing access to digital collections.
•
a process of certification for digital archives is needed to create an overall climate
of trust about the prospects of preserving digital information.
The issue of certification, and how to evaluate trust into the future, as opposed to a
relatively temporary trust which may be more simply tested, has been a recurring
request, repeated in many subsequent studies and workshops.
The OAIS Reference Model Open Archival Information System (OAIS) [
4
], is
now adopted as the “de facto” standard for building digital archives [
243
].
25.1.1 Testability and Key OAIS Concepts
As discussed in
Chap. 6
one of the key drivers of OAIS is the need for claims about
preservation of digitally encoded information to be testable. These are summarised
here and then developed in more detail.
