OAIS and ISO 16363

This section describes the "gold standard" for digital preservation.

The Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), also known as ISO 14721:2012, is the "gold standard" guiding how digital preservation should be done. The ISO16363 standard was designed to provide the basis of an ISO audit and certification process.

Many people fail to appreciate the importance of some of these concepts, especially where they have not been used to dealing with complex scientific data. Just as one can put a book on a shelf and be confident that it can be picked up and read in 100 years, as long as the book does not get lost of be burned, many think the same is true for data. But they are mistaken.

We all have experience of looking at an old spreadsheet on our computer but not be able to understand what the columns are. Complex scientific data where one needs the meaning of the numbers, their units and specialised software, has a special fragility and requires much more work to preserve. OAIS and ISO 16363 were designed to cover all types of digitally encoded information, whether it is a book or complex scientific data.

David Giaretta

In this section you can find:

• A guide to understand OAIS and the ISO 16363: describes the key ideas of OAIS and ISO 16363 together with an explanation of what conformance requires.

• LABDRIVE support for OAIS/ISO 16363 Conformance: This section describes how LABDRIVE can be used to support preservation. Although no piece of software can preserve information by itself, the wrong software can prevent one from carrying out preservation. On the other hand the right software can support and make it much easier for an archive to carry out preservation if properly configured.

• Benefits of preserving (research) information: preservation requires resources including financial and intellectual resources. This section gives examples of why preservation is worth doing.

• Planning for preservation: as with any serious activity, digital preservation requires planning. This section describes what needs to be done.

• ISO 16363 certification guide: describes why certification is important, why an archive should be certified and what needs to be done.