Towards a Large Access-Oriented Digital Archive

摘要

The ultimate goal of preserving digital records is to make them accessible to the public and authorized parties for centuries. Such access should be done in a way that is independent of technical application softwares and platforms with which those records were created. According to the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model, Access to records is one of the main components of an archival system. The Access component allows the Consumer to search for records in the Archival Storage, and obtain relevant result sets. Although Access is at the end of OAIS data flow, the quality of service that it can provide to the consumers depends on both ingest and preservation planning. Indeed, the ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) process at ingest time will determine the richness and comprehensiveness of the created metadata, and the level of granularity or coarseness of the discovery and access process. Moreover, the planning and execution of preservation methods should take into account not only the pure transformation of file formats, but the quality of access and discovery of digital records. This paper examines the challenges to prepare and provide search and access to a large digital archives throughout the different phases of the OAIS functional flow, namely, ingest, and preservation. From the architecture perspective, the guiding principle of a large Access-Oriented Digital Archive should be to realize an Open Platform that facilitates the flow of data from ingest to access. The framework used to architect this platform layer should be extensible so that future search and access techniques could be easily inserted without major redesign of the system.