Jisc funding allows testing of National Archives' preservation practice
In January of this year the UK Data Archive, jointly funded by Jisc and the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council), was appointed as a legal place of deposit for National Archives documents. With both the UK Data Archive (UKDA) and the National Archives having a responsibility for the preservation and dissemination of electronic records of national importance, the question of preservation testing and compliance becomes of central importance.
Following funding from the Jisc Digital Preservation and Asset Management programme, a report has been published which compares the National Archives’ preservation practice with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model, the leading internationally recognised standard for digital archives which addresses the structure and operations of digital archive facilities. The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), also employed in the report, is a schema for encoding descriptive, administrative and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library.
While the report focuses on how the National Archives and the UKDA comply with these international standards, the report is also intended as a tool for other organisations to test their own compliance with these standards.
The assessment was carried out by the UKDA, the National Archives and the Estonian Business Archive.
To access the report, please click on this link: Assessment of UKDA and TNA Compliance with OAIS and METS Standards.