Purpose and practical value

Digital archiving, as a part of information lifecycle management, is a complex discipline that has to take into account many different components, ranging from knowledge, business rules and workflows to guidelines, specifications and software tools.

The purpose of this eArchiving Reference Architecture is to:

• Provide an overview of the motivation (i.e. “why”) of long-term accessibility;

• Provide a common understanding of the strategies and principles leading the implementation of a digital archive;

• Explain the key business processes of digital archiving and long-term accessibility;

• Provide a strategy and motivation context for archival standards and software components (i.e. explain what tools are useful in which context).

Some examples of how different stakeholder groups can reuse the Reference Architecture are:

• Data owners (operations managers) can use the motivation layer to find out if and why they need a digital archive and use the model to influence funders about the relevance of digital archiving, long-term accessibility planning and information lifecycle management;

• Archives (including archival service providers) can use the business and strategy layers to easily understand which processes and tasks are relevant to be implemented and why;

• Software developers (for both data owners and archives) can check which standards and specifications are reasonable to be supported by their software and which software libraries are available in order to implement such support in practice.

Please note, that the distinction amongst data owners, archives and software developers is somewhat artificial as all of these roles can occur in a single organisation.