Preservation of digital publications: an OAIS extension and implementation

ABSTRACT

Over the last decades, the amount of digital documents has increased exponentially. Nevertheless, traditional document engineering methods are applied. Even worse, the long-term preservation issues have been neglected in standard document life cycle implementations.Our digital (cultural) heritage is, therefore, highly endangered by the silent obsolescence of data formats, software and hardware. Severe losses of information already happened. It is high time to implement concrete solutions.Fortunately numerous institutions already target these issues. Moreover, with the OAIS reference model¹ a rich standardized conceptual framework is available, which already serves as implementation basis.²This paper discusses an extension to the OAIS reference model and illustrates a prototype implementation of a document life cycle that is enriched by functions for long-term preservation.More precisely, this paper aims to provide first solutions to the following three problem areas:<ol>

1. Detachment: OAIS defines no functions for the process of detaching digital documents prior to the ingest function. This detachment function is modeled in great detail and implemented for the provision of the so-called OAIS's submission information packages (SIP).

2. DBMS: OAIS defines a very complex functionality. We show how a standard database management system (DBMS) can support a wide variety of required functionalities in an integrated and homogenous way. Among others OAIS's data management, archival storage, and access are supported.

3. Metadata: So far, OAIS does not cover any aspects of the metadata generation. Here, we briefly discuss the (semi-)automatic generation of a metadata set.

</ol>In order to evaluate the feasibility of our approach, we built a first prototype. We carried out our experiments in close cooperation with the Bavarian State Library, Munich, which is engaged in numerous international initiatives dealing with the problem of long-term preservation. Our University Library also supported us by delivering a representative test set of digital publications.³We conclude our paper by presenting some lessons learned from our conceptual work and from our real world experiments.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.1 Logical Design
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.7 Digital Libraries

General Terms:
Design, Standardization

Keywords:
OAIS, archival systems, database management, detachment of digital publications, digital libraries, document management, long-term preservation, metadata