OAIS and E-depot: The Key to Sustainable Digital Preservation

The OAIS model

To design and implement an e-depot with a sustainable vision, the OAIS model provides a framework for digital archiving. This ensures that all necessary aspects are taken into account during development. The model consists of six functional entities:

• Ingest (Delivery): the process of accepting and processing digital objects for storage in the e-repository. This includes metadata extraction, validation and normalisation of digital objects.
• Archival Storage: the management of digital objects in the e-depot, including storage, security, backup and replication.
• Data Management: managing the metadata of digital objects, such as file formats, access restrictions, authentication options, etc.
• Administration: the management of the e-repository itself, including management of users, access rights, security.
• Access: the process of providing access to digital objects in the e-depot, including authentication and authorisation.
• Preservation Planning: planning the strategies for long-term preservation of digital objects, including migration to new formats and technologies.

What is an E-depot?

An e-depot is a solution for the long-term sustainable management and preservation of digital information. The purpose of an e-depot is to keep digital information accessible and preserved for future generations. After all, the digital train does not stand still: carriers and formats change at a rapid pace.

The link between OAIS and Zeticon's E-depot

Zeticon's e-depot is founded on the theoretical framework provided by the OAIS model. In its e-depot, Zeticon converts the aforementioned entities into an intuitive software solution and provides the necessary infrastructure for long-term management of digital archives. We apply the theory of the previous section to our solution:

• Ingest: Digital information can be delivered to the e-depot by producers in various ways (manual, semi- or fully automatic). Afterwards, delivered objects and their metadata are validated during various (both technical and manual) checks.
• Archival storage: All delivered objects are safely stored within the e-depot according to established rules and agreements on security and back-up.
• Data Management: In addition to descriptive metadata, Zeticon's e-depot can also store technical and management metadata. This metadata is used for easy retrieval of objects, but also for defining access restrictions and other management rules.
• Administration: Thanks to the integrated module, all kinds of management tasks such as creating users and access groups can be carried out from within the e-depot.
• Access: Based on the assigned user rights, a user can consult the information. Thanks to the various search options, the user always arrives at the right search results. Different types of users can consult the information from the interface or via API integration in another system or portal.
• Preservation planning: A format register determines which file formats are allowed in the e-repository and for which formats a consultation and/or preservation copy must be created. We closely monitor the latest software developments and implement continuous improvements to our software. For example, we keep the above-mentioned register of formats up-to-date to be able to archive the widest range of digital files and ensure the preservation of vulnerable digital information in a sustainable way. As a result, you as a user can use our application with peace of mind.

Zeticon's e-depot is structured in such a way that you don't need to be an expert on the application to get started. With a clear interface and a good overview of all possible actions, new users can quickly get started with Zeticon's e-depot.

Different types of digital objects can be stored in the e-depot, such as documents, images, audio and video files, datasets and web pages. The e-depot ensures standardised storage of these digital objects, allowing them to be managed and preserved in a consistent manner. In this way, it facilitates long-term access to the digital objects, regardless of the hardware or infrastructure used.

What can our e-depot do for your organisation?

Zeticon's e-depot follows the OAIS standard yet is structured to be flexible enough to meet our customers' individual needs. Its user-friendly and intuitive interface allows different types of users to quickly get to grips with it. Using the extensive search options, the right files are quickly found. Zeticon's e-depot completely unburdens the customer and its users in the sustainable preservation of their digital archive.