Digital Preservation: How to Be Trustworthy

Abstract

The Publications Office of the European Union has started a project for the long-term preservation of its digital publications to a new digital archival repository that contains legislative collections (such as the Official Journal of the European Union, treaties, international agreements, etc.), non-legislative collections (such as general and scientific publications), master data (such as descriptive, technical and provenance metadata specifications) and other data (such as datasets and websites). With the aim of safeguarding EU digital publications without any alteration during their life cycle, we have decided to follow standards ISO 14721:2012 (Open Archival Information System) to define the model of our digital preservation system and ISO 16363:2012 to verify the trustworthiness of the digital archival repository. In this context, we will deal with the following issue: how can we be sure that a digital object is the same as when it was created and has not been altered during its life cycle, both before and after its ingestion to the repository? In other words, how can our digital archival repository be trusted? The basic actions of the Publications Office towards this direction are: (a) to define a digital preservation plan; (b) to define and preserve representation information (master data and other specifications); (c) to define the designated community and its monitor; (d) to define and implement digital preservation strategies such as fixity, maintaining a read-only archive, keeping two copies in different physical data centres, etc.; (e) to define and implement provenance metadata; and (f) to have a technology watch of formats, standards and digital preservation strategies.