eArchiving - Archives

1. Get familiar with legislation and standards

Since there is no European Union Directive that governs digital archiving, you should start by checking how local legal obligations are regulating archiving activities in our Member State. What we provide are documentation and support services based on international standards to help you describe, transmit and preserve digital information. The main standard for digital archiving is the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS): ISO 14721:2012.

2. Assess maturity

If your organisation already has some sort of digital archiving system in place, use our Maturity model self-assessment tool to help identify action points for improvement.

3. Define a long-term preservation strategy

The government organisation or business whose digital information you are archiving will most likely define a digital archiving plan. Archiving plans usually define what digital information needs to be kept, for how long and who can access it. Based on these needs, define a long-term preservation strategy to ensure the safety, integrity and accessibility of digital information.

The E-ARK Knowledge Centre provides a comprehensive set of services that allow users to understand, contribute and validate good practices relating to information governance.

4. Decide how to enable digital archiving

Help your government or business organisation decide whether to develop your own application, buy software from an external provider or use existing technology, such as eArchiving, to put together a solution.

Make sure you base your solutions on standards to ensure interoperability of archiving technologies today and in the future. Our sample software components demonstrate how standards-based technical specifications can be applied to the various phases of the archival workflow (ingestion, preservation and access). eArchiving offers both mix and match components, as well as end-to-end solutions. Simply pick the components you need. You can also use our E-ARK General Model to find the best components and technologies to put together your solution.

Consider the benefits of going digital with eArchiving.

5. Develop or configure chosen solution

If you decided to develop your own application, you can use our technical specifications to ensure it conforms to standards. If chose to use an existing solution, we hope you considered using eArchiving sample software.

Develop interfaces to export digital information from your line of business systems into your digital archiving system.

6. Deploy and test

Deploy the components of your chosen infrastructure and test compliance of your solution with applicable specifications.

7. Manage archived data

Once you have started to archive digital information with eArchiving, you can always retrieve data with the  E-ARK Platform UI. [NB. Requires EU Login]

The eArchiving Service Desk is open for your questions, comments, incidents and change requests at any point before, during or after implementation.