A Reference Architecture For Digital Preservation

Apart from being a technological issue, digital preservation raises several organizational challeng es. These challenges are starting to be addressed in th e industrial design and e-Science domains, where emerging requirements cannot be addressed directly by OAIS. Thus, new approaches to design and assess digital preservation environments are required. We propose a Reference Architecture as a tool that can capture the essence of those emerging preservation environments and provide ways of developing and deploying preservation-enabled systems in organizations. This paper presents the main concept s from which a Reference Architecture for digital preservation can be built, along with an analysis o f the environment surrounding a digital preservation syst em. We present a concrete Reference Architecture, consisting of a process to derive concrete digital preservation architectures, which is supported by a n architecture framework for organizing architecture descriptions. In that way, organizations can be bet ter prepared to cope with the present and future challe nges of digital preservation.