Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
It covers principles needed to inspire confidence that third party certification of
the management of the digital repository has been performed with
•
impartiality,
•
competence,
•
responsibility,
•
openness,
•
confidentiality, and
•
responsiveness to complaints
At the time of writing both documents are in an advanced state of preparation; the
first of these documents has been submitted for ISO review and the second should
be submitted soon. While the reviews are underway further preparations for the
accreditation and certification processes will be undertaken. It should be noted that
the OAIS reference Model has also been undergoing revision and the new version
has been submitted for ISO review. Because of the close links between the metrics
and OAIS concepts and terminology it is important that the two remain consistent,
and cross-membership of the working groups will ensure this.
In addition to the “central” accreditation body there will be an eventual need for
a network of local accreditation and certification bodies.
25.5 Summary
It has been recognised for a long time that there is a need for a way to judge the
extent to which an archive can be trusted to preserve digitally encoded information.
On the one hand funders of such archives need some formal certification process
to provide assurance that their funding is well spent and that their important digital
holdings will continue to be usable and understandable into the future. On the other
hand it is probably also true that many who manage such archives would want some
less formal process.
Considerable work has been carried out on the second of these aims, namely peer
or informal certification. The RAC Working Group seems, at the time of writing, to
be close to take important steps towards the first aim (formal ISO certification).
Difficult organisational issues still need to be addressed but there is a clear roadmap
for doing this. Even if all this is put in place the take-up of the process and its
impact on, for example, determining the funding of digital repositories is far from
guaranteed. However in order to make progress the RAC Working Group believes
that the effort must be made.
