[Moims-dai] Fwd: Fwd: General Public V Designated Community

Tue Nov 26 17:25:39 UTC 2019

This is very problematic for large public archives such as us here at The National Archives (UK). There are a number of issues at play, but I think the main one is seeing all institutions as having to preserve every themselves to allow independent understandability: in reality all institutions effectively sit within a broad federation of knowledge institutions and online infrastructure. We hold the records of government, the British Library holds published material, between the two (and potentially a lot of reading) you could probably independently understand everything we have. I took a wider look at this with a collaborative doctoral student here earlier in the year in what ended up as this blog post https://www.dpconline.org/blog/access-what-we-are-preserving (we’d submitted as a short paper for iPRES, but while the peer review comments were positive it didn’t quite make the available space on the programme).
--
David Underdown - david.underdown at nationalarchives.gov.uk<mailto:david.underdown at nationalarchives.gov.uk>
Senior Digital Archivist, Digital Preservation
+44 (0)20 3908 9228
The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk<http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/>

From: Terry Longstreth <terry.longstreth at comcast.net>
Sent: 26 November 2019 15:23
To: MOIMS-Data Archive Ingestion <moims-dai at mailman.ccsds.org>
Subject: [Moims-dai] Fwd: Fwd: General Public V Designated Community

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject:
Fwd: General Public V Designated Community
Date:
Tue, 26 Nov 2019 10:19:59 -0500
From:
The Conrads <conradsireland at gmail.com><mailto:conradsireland at gmail.com>
To:
longstreth at acm.org<mailto:longstreth at acm.org>

Here is the massage I have been trying to send to the moms-dai list.

Mark
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: The Conrads <conradsireland at gmail.com<mailto:conradsireland at gmail.com>>
Date: Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 8:11 AM
Subject: Fwd: General Public V Designated Community
To: <moims-dai at mailman.ccsds.org<mailto:moims-dai at mailman.ccsds.org>>

Here is a message I sent on the 16th. Not sure that It made it to the list.
Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:
From: The Conrads <conradsireland at gmail.com<mailto:conradsireland at gmail.com>>
Date: November 16, 2019 at 2:36:03 PM EST
To: moims-dai at mailman.ccsds.org<mailto:moims-dai at mailman.ccsds.org>
Subject: General Public V Designated Community
As promised, I have uploaded a strawman text to review.oais.info<http://review.oais.info> to address the issue of general public v Designated Community.

Here is a copy of what I uploaded:

General Public v Designated Community

Many repositories have as part of their mission/mandate to serve the general public. In other words, the repository must disseminate any information that the Consumer is allowed to access without violating any restrictions on the release of the requested information. Some repositories have raised concerns about the tension between their requirements to serve the general public and the OAIS requirement to serve the repository’s Designated Community(ies).

The purposes for designating these two different classes of Consumers do have some overlap, but they also have some substantive differences. Indicating that a repository serves the general public means that anyone (with a few exceptions) can be a Consumer of the OAIS’ information. Indicating that a repository serves a particular Designated Community(ies) means that the members of the Designated Community may access any information the OAIS holds subject to any restrictions on the release of the data. NOTE: The OAIS Reference Model, and this standard, do not require repositories to limit their Consumers to members of their Designated Communities.

Designated Communities serve a distinct purpose related to the Long Term Preservation of the information held by the repository. Long Term Preservation is, “[t]he act of maintaining information, Independently Understandable by a Designated Community, and with evidence supporting its Authenticity, over the Long Term.” One of the mandatory responsibilities of an OAIS is to ensure that the information it holds is Independently Understandable by the Designated Community. The OAIS must periodically assess whether or not the information held for a specific Designated Community is still Independently Understandable by that Designated Community using their current Knowledge Base. If it is not, the OAIS must add additional Representation Information or PDI to make it so. If a repository collects information across many topics/domains, it may need to have multiple Designated Communities for the different topics/domains.

Under the OAIS Reference Model, and this standard, an OAIS does not have to ensure that its holdings are Independently Understandable to any Consumer outside its Designated Community(ies), though it may choose to try. In practical terms ensuring its holdings are and remain Independently Understandable to the general public would be a nearly impossible task. Consider, for example, maintaining enough Representation Information and PDI to make Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity Independently Understandable to a 6-year-old who reads only Korean. While many repositories will say they serve the general public, there are usually unwritten limits to the types of services the repository provides. By contrast, an OAIS must ensure that the information it provides remains Independently Understandable to the relevant Designated Community through time.

Looking forward to further discussion.

Mark

Please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- National Archives Disclaimer This email and any files transmitted with it are intended solely for the use of the individual(s) to whom they are addressed. If you are not the intended recipient and have received this email in error, please notify the sender and delete the email. Opinions, conclusions and other information in this message and attachments that do not relate to the official business of The National Archives are neither given nor endorsed by it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.ccsds.org/pipermail/moims-dai/attachments/20191126/b389fb37/attachment-0001.html>