Preservation areas

Preservation areas are a logical grouping applied to the preserved objects. This grouping allows for:

• Association to permissions. So that it determines that users access a specific part of the repository.

• Limiting the scope of audits / selecting the objects for the audits. Allowing for the setting of different audit frequencies, according to the importance of each part of the repository.

• Linking preservation plans. Allowing applying different submission agreements and setting each one’s associated characteristics, metadata schemas, object conditions, formats, etc.

There are some concepts that may be used as the base for the division of the repository in preservation areas:

• Compliance with the different submission agreements.

• Information source.

• Object type. For example: documents, files, sound, web files, and video.

• Access rights to objects. For example: security grants in document access.

These concepts should be considered and combined to generate the preservation areas to configure. The usual quantity of configured preservation areas goes between a few units and a few dozens. In case of preserving material from a lot of different sources, it may be reasonable to generate the areas around another concept, and allow object selection in the catalog through association of source-related metadata descriptors.

Note: a preservation area may have several preservation plans associated to it, but there may only be one active at a time.