Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories: Repository Exchange Package Use Cases and Best Practices

Abstract

Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories (TIPR) is a project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to create and test a packaging format for inter-repository Archival Information Package (AIP) exchange. The result of this work is the Repository eXchange Package (RXP), a lightweight packaging format that uses the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) schema to encode the RXP structure and the Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) schema to encode digital provenance. The RXP can accommodate heterogeneous AIP structures and can be easily generated and ingested by heterogeneous preservation environments while maintaining an unbroken chain of digital provenance. These attributes make the RXP useful in a variety of preservation contexts: succession, disaster recovery, software migration, diversification, and specialized content processing. The TIPR project and the RXP format have been described in papers delivered at iPRES 2009 and 2010, DLF Spring 2009, and the NIST US Digital Preservation Interoperability Framework Workshop. This paper focuses on how the RXP can be used in each of the different contexts listed above, describes potential issues for each scenario, and recommends best practices for creating, interpreting and ingesting RXP packages. It also explores limitations of the RXP and modifications that have been suggested by other parties. Finally, it outlines decisions that transfer partners must negotiate in order to support successful exchange of content between repositories.