Digital archiving aims to keep organisations’ information accessible for as long as needed, especially if “as long as needed” means multiple decades or centuries. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution in archiving. The exact setup of a digital archive depends on the specific legal, organisational and business context of an institution and the evolving needs of the users and customers. For example, the needs concerning the security of a clinical trials archive holding personalised content are fundamentally different from a historic archive keeping a set of public digitised eighteenth-century records. The same applies to the information gathering and reuse processes and many other aspects of both archives.
Therefore, establishing an effective digital archive requires a good understanding of the business and organisational context and needs. Only on such a basis, an institution can choose the most suitable technical standards, specifications, software and hardware components and implement these. In short, institutions will be able to implement digital archiving when they understand the archive’s role in relation to the rest of their functions and processes.
This eArchiving Reference Architecture aims to support institutions to implement or improve digital archiving operations by describing the most crucial motivation, strategy, business and infrastructure components. It allows institutions to understand more easily what and why they want to achieve with their digital archive, and help implementing suitable processes and infrastructure.
The eArchiving Reference Architecture has a particular focus on interoperability. This means that archival tasks that are essential for information exchange between systems or components (i.e. pre-ingest, ingest, access, preservation planning) are modelled in more detail, while internal functions of a digital archive (i.e. administration, storage) are covered more broadly.
Please note that this Reference Architecture does focus only on digital long-term accessibility, and as such does not cover institutions’ typical support functions (financial and staff management, IT security, etc) and the management of analogue information. Further, the model does not make any assumptions on the digital archive type – it can be an archival module within a larger information system, an institutional archive or a separate archival institution or memory institution.
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:
Some examples of how different stakeholder groups can reuse the Reference Architecture are:
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.