Description (en)
Apart from being a technological issue, digital
preservation raises several organizational challenges.
These challenges are starting to be addressed in the
industrial design and e-Science domains, where
emerging requirements cannot be addressed directly by
OAIS. Thus, new approaches to design and assess
digital preservation environments are required. We
propose a Reference Architecture as a tool that can
capture the essence of those emerging preservation
environments and provide ways of developing and
deploying preservation-enabled systems in
organizations. This paper presents the main concepts
from which a Reference Architecture for digital
preservation can be built, along with an analysis of the
environment surrounding a digital preservation system.
We present a concrete Reference Architecture,
consisting of a process to derive concrete digital
preservation architectures, which is supported by an
architecture framework for organizing architecture
descriptions. In that way, organizations can be better
prepared to cope with the present and future challenges
of digital preservation.