OAIS in More Depth - Advanced Digital Preservation - page 52

applicable. Chapter 23 describes the ways in which Representation Information
may be shared, in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort across large
numbers of archives, and instead to share the burden. These techniques also
help over the long term, as the Knowledge Base of the Designated Community
changes. Chapter 16 covers the tools developed by CASPAR to detect gaps in
the Representation Information as the Knowledge Base changes, and techniques
for filling those gaps. These tools will be discussed in Sect. 17.4 .
Follow documented policies and procedures which ensure that the information
is preserved against all reasonable contingencies, including the demise of the
archive, ensuring that it is never deleted unless allowed as part of an approved
strategy. There should be no ad-hoc deletions,
WHY : This responsibility states the fairly obvious point that the archive should
look after the information in the basic ways e.g. against floods and theft. The
demise of the archive deserves special consideration. Although many archives
act as it they will always exist with adequate funding, this particular respon-
sibility points out that such an assumption must be questioned. In addition of
course the archive should not be able to delete its holdings on a whim. Many
might take the view that deletions should never be allowed, however others
insist that deletions are a natural stage in the life of the data. The wording of
this responsibility allows the archive to make such deletions but only under (its
own) strictly defined circumstances.
HOW : Backup policies and security procedures should take care of the “rea-
sonably contingencies” as long as they are adequate. While it is not possible to
guard against the demise of the archive, for example if funding dries-up, nev-
ertheless it is possible to make plans to safeguard the digital objects by making
agreements with other archives. Such agreements would provide a commitment
by the second archive to take over the preservation of the digital objects. Of
course since one cannot be sure which other archives will continue to exist, an
archive may make agreements with several other archives, and perhaps different
archives may agree to take different subsets of the holdings.
Make the preserved information available to the Designated Community and
enable the information to be disseminated as copies of, or as traceable to, the
original submitted Data Objects with evidence supporting its Authenticity.
WHY : There are two parts to this responsibility. The first is that the digi-
tally encoded information has to be made available, at least to the Designated
Community. The second part contains a new requirement which is introduced
here because we are talking not about understandability, which many other