Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The
Preservation Planning
entity provides the services and functions for mon-
itoring the environment of the OAIS, providing recommendations and preservation
plans to ensure that the information stored in the OAIS remains accessible to, and
understandable by, the Designated Community over the Long Term, even if the
original computing environment becomes obsolete. Preservation Planning func-
tions include evaluating the contents of the archive and periodically recommending
archival information updates, recommending the migration of current archive hold-
ings, developing recommendations for archive standards and policies, providing
periodic risk analysis reports, and monitoring changes in the technology environ-
ment and in the Designated Community's service requirements and Knowledge
Base. Preservation Planning also designs Information Package templates and
provides design assistance and review to specialize these templates into SIPs
and AIPs for specific submissions. Preservation Planning also develops detailed
Migration plans, software prototypes and test plans to enable implementation of
Administration migration goals.
The
Access
entity provides the services and functions that support Consumers
in determining the existence, description, location and availability of information
stored in the OAIS, and allowing Consumers to request and receive informa-
tion products. Access functions include communicating with Consumers to receive
requests, applying controls to limit access to specially protected information, coor-
dinating the execution of requests to successful completion, generating responses
(Dissemination Information Packages, query responses, reports) and delivering the
responses to Consumers.
In addition to the entities described above, there are various
Common Services
assumed to be available. These services are considered to constitute another func-
tional entity in this model. This entity is so pervasive that, for clarity, it is not shown
in Fig.
6.8
.
Many archives have mapped themselves to the OAIS Functional Model; see for
example the BADC archive [
27
].
It has been said that almost anything could be mapped to the Functional Model.
For example a simple network switch has
•
a Producer - the one who generates the network packets
•
Ingest - which accepts the packet
•
a Consumer, to whom the network packets are sent which it receives from
Access
•
an Administration which determines which packet goes to which consumer
•
Archival Storage - for the few nano-seconds for which the packet is to be held
•
Data Management which looks after the network packet
•
Preservation Planning is, in this case, essentially nothing
In this way we can describe a network switch using OAIS terminology. However
it does not mean that the switch does anything useful when it comes to digital
preservation.
