NOST Hosts Archiving Workshop

Volume 14, Number 3, September 1998

Digital Archive Directions Workshop Extremely Successful

The Digital Archive Directions (DADs) Workshop was held at the National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) facility in College Park, Maryland, from June 22-26 , 1998. Participation was broad, including people supporting various NASA archives across multiple disciplines, other government agencies, various academic institutions, the Research Libraries Group (RLG)and several U.K. archives for science and academic materials.

The workshop was extremely successful in achieving its objectives:

• To publicize the emerging Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) ISO standard Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) through a tutorial session and gain acceptance of the reference model, obtain comments, and proposed enhancements to the model from this broad community of archive providers and users.

• To seek and find common interest in developing various recommended practices, standards, and reports addressing archival issues and document these as possible work items under various organizations including ISO Technical Committee 20/Sub-Committee 13 and the CCSDS.

The workshop was organized into an open session and a closed session. The open session consisted of a two-hour tutorial on the reference model and 12 invited presentations to identify the state of the art in related standards and practices. The closed session was based on the submission of a position paper on some archival need or issue. The closed session was organized into three parallel sessions as follows:

• Working Group 1: Administration and Procedures - eight papers.

• Working Group 2: Ingest and Storage - eight papers.

• Working Group 3: Data Management and Access - ten papers.

The morning of the last day was devoted to ax plenary session that included reports from the Working Groups and Plenary recommendations.

There were two categories of recommendations that came from the DADs Workshop. The first category came from the working groups; these recommendations were basically technical in nature and included comments on the OAIS Reference Model and suggestions for future standardization topics such as the following:

• Data Ingest Methodology.

• Archival Submission Information Package Standard.

• Standard Consumer Archive Interface.

Further recommendations and details can be found in the final workshop r able about the end of September 1998 from the DADs Web Site at http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/dads/

The second category of recommendations came from the plenary meeting that occurred on the last day of the workshop, and these recommendations tended to have a management or administrative orientation. Because these three recommendations have far reaching implications to the future of the program, they are provided below:

 
• A plenary recommendation was that it would be useful to investigate the feasibility, practicality, and utility of establishing an international consortium, organized around the Reference Model, that would be responsible for developing a consensus understanding across a wide variety of communities facing digital archive needs. The consortium would promote cooperative efforts regarding digital archives. This responsibility would include facilitating progression and acceptance of digital archive best practices and standards, developing accreditation guidelines for archives and championing standard software capabilities.

   

• A second recommendation from the plenary was the need for continued near-term coordination and cooperation across bodies concerned with digital archiving. Critical to this objective is the need to widen the review of the OAIS Reference Model to assure it services the needs of the global digital archiving community. In this regard, one of the suggestions that came from and was accepted by the plenary was that there should be another workshop, as soon as practical, with invited participants from a variety of organizations who should have an interest in the reference model and the workshop recommendations. Attendees would be presented an overview of the Reference Model and the recommendations from the DADs Workshop. The principal objectives of this second workshop would be to obtain feedback (1) on the Reference Model and the recommendations from the DADs Workshop, as to their appropriateness and criticality to the communities represented and (2) on the invited organizations' interest in supporting an international archival consortium.

   

• A third plenary recommendation is that accreditation of archives is important and should be pursued, but that it can only be accomplished when best practices are in place. Also, it was believed that best practices are probably somewhat community-dependent, and therefore accreditation principles would have to be evolved and accreditation specifics that are community-specific would have to be developed.

The level of enthusiasm for the work on the reference model and the desire to follow up to create more of this type of synergism was extremely gratifying. Many attendees remarked on how much useful information they had obtained from the workshop.

For more information about the OAIS Reference Model or the DADs Workshop, readers are directed to the Web site at http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/dads

Opportunities to participate in future work and related workshops can be indicated by following the directions at the ISO archiving Web pages starting at http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/overview.html

Alternatively, please contact Donald Sawyer or John Garrett directly for further information.

John Garrett Goddard Space Flight Center Code 633 Greenbelt, Maryland 20771 United States Telephone: +1.301.286.3575 E-Mail: John.Garrett@ndads.gsfc.nasa.gov FAX: +1.301.286.1771

Donald Sawyer Goddard Space Flight Center Code 633 Greenbelt, Maryland 20771 United States Telephone: +1.301.286.2748 E-Mail: Donald.Sawyer@ndads.gsfc.nasa.gov FAX: +1.301.286.1771

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