5. Archiving is pragmatic, efficient, flexible and sustainable
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Statement At any given point in time, archiving implements solutions that are fit for purpose, sufficient, adaptable, flexible and sustainable. Rational Practical archiving is a balance between providing the best possible access to information and, at the same time, is sufficient and efficient. Archival operations should be established in a way that takes into account available human, intellectual and material resources and that respects green sustainability considerations. This also means that an archive should not impose an absolute set of standards and guidelines but rather consider that the measures and processes implemented are pragmatic, sufficient, and politically, technically, organisationally and financially possible. One of the critical risks in digital archiving is the availability of staff skilled in the relevant aspects of archiving, digital preservation, and IT. Therefore, in most organisations, it is reasonable to automate archival processes to the largest possible extent. Another critical consideration regarding sustainability is that valuable long-term information needs to last longer than any given information system. As such, adaptable and flexible system architectures should be preferred, as these allow data owners to update and replace systems or individual components whenever needed efficiently. Implications – Information should be categorised into risk and value categories. This allows for the definition of archiving efforts that are appropriate to the value of the information and the availability of resources (see also principle 4). – Archiving can either be implemented as a component or set of functionalities within larger information systems or as a separate “digital archives”. Such architectural decisions must be made by weighing the cost and efficiency of either solution. – Archiving should, as much as possible, make use of international standards, specifications, best practices, and tools to lower the total cost of ownership and enhance interoperability. Whenever available, tools which have been certified to support appropriate standards should be preferred. – Archival decisions, including the ones about storage policies, continuous integrity checks and validation, should be done concerning green sustainability (i.e. the amount of electricity and other resources required to implement these decisions). – Institutions implementing long-term availability measures must be aware of their internal skills and competencies. Pragmatic decisions need to be made about which archival tasks can be carried out internally versus which can and have to be outsourced from external archival service providers (for an overview of archival tasks, please see the business layer description of this Reference Architecture). – Records management functionality and the transfer of content between different information systems (either different generations of the same system or between business information systems and archival components) can be a significant cost component. This relates to practically any data production and management systems with long-term preservation consequences at the data producer and at the archival institution sites. Institutions can save a lot when taking these needs into account while designing business processes and business information systems (see also Principle 6). Notes (if any)