OAIS in More Depth - Advanced Digital Preservation - page 50

6.2 OAIS Mandatory Responsibilities
The mandatory responsibilities which an OAIS must fulfil are discussed within
the standard itself - we use here the text from the updated version of OAIS. The
following attempts to provide the whys and hows of these responsibilities:
Negotiate for and accept appropriate information from information Producers.
WHY : The reason for this requirement is that many times in the past digital
objects have essentially been dumped on an archive with little or no docu-
mentation about it, making them practically impossible to preserve. In order
to help prevent this the archive should make an agreement with the Producer
for the hand over not just of the digital objects but also the Representation
Information and Preservation Description Information (see Chap. 10 ), which
includes, amongst other things, Provenance Information.
HOW : OAIS does not give a model for such an agreement, but the follow-on
standards PAIMAS [ 22 ] and PAIS [ 23 ] provide some guidelines.
Obtain sufficient control of the information provided to the level needed to ensure
Long Term Preservation.
WHY : The issue here is that the archive needs physical as well as legal con-
trol over the information. The need for physical control is fairly obvious, for
example to ensure that the bits are safe. Legal control is required because copy-
right and other legal restrictions, which may be different from one country to
the next and may change over time, could otherwise limit [ 24 ] the copying and
migrations (see Chap. 12 ) that the archive almost certainly will have to perform.
While the lack of such legal control might not stop the archive performing such
copying, nevertheless there is a risk that subsequent legal action may force the
archive to stop and delete such copies or face financial penalties which could,
at the extreme, cause the archive to cease operations.
HOW : The most obvious way of taking physical control would involve the
archive taking a copy of the digital objects and keep them in its own storage.
Legal and contractual control would require appropriate licences and/or right
transfers from the owners of those rights. Further information about Digital
Rights Management is provided in Sect. 10.6 .
Determine, either by itself or in conjunction with other parties, which communi-
ties should become the Designated Community and, therefore, should be able to
understand the information provided, thereby defining its Knowledge Base.