The Archiving by Design (or by an equivalent name Sustainable Access) is new approach in digital archiving.
The Whitepaper prepared by the Archiving by Design Working Group of The European Archives Group (EAG) summarises the approach:
“Digital transformation keeps altering the playing field in which we operate as an archival and records management community:
Traditional approaches for archives and records management no longer prove to be effective in the public sector. Information created or received might never reach the dedicated archival or records management systems we have created. There is too much information to manage the traditional way and digital information has to be available from the first moment in the life cycle to be used and reused outside the primary working process. Traditional archiving is perceived as an activity that starts after the working process is finished. It is more effective when information systems are designed in such a way that future proof accessibility of information is secured. When this is combined with early identification of the existence or value of information and with proper management of the entire lifecycle, information of enduring value will be preserved and accessed more efficiently on external repositories (eg. digital archives).
To deal with these challenges, it is necessary to take measures even before information is created or received. We call this archiving by design.
The definition of archiving by design is:
During the design or adjustment of information systems, the appropriate measures are taken to ensure that the information becomes, and stays, sustainably accessible.”
The eArchiving Reference Architecture working group has decided to support this approach by creating some views cover the whole information lifecycle and showing the relationship between this new approach and the eArchiving Initiative.
We have built our views on the Dutch DUTO framework, the only existing implementation of the Archiving by Desing approach at the time of creating this version of the reference architecture.We haven’t tried to consolidate the DUTO and OAIS language, because the DUTO framework is built upon other standards. We have used the DUTO functions as they appear in DUTO. To prevent misunderstanding we have prefixed all Archiving by Design elements with ‘AbD-‘.
The set of Archiving by Design related views consists of a Strategy view listing and grouping the required capabilities, several business views positioning the DUTO functions within this framework of capabilities, a DUTO function to OAIS mapping, and an overview of the steps of the Archiving by Design Scan method.