User:Pamcastell/sandbox

An Open Archival Information System (or OAIS) is an archive, consisting of an organization of people and systems, that has accepted the responsibility to preserve information and make it available for a Designated Community.

OAIS, known as ISO 14721:2003, is widely accepted and utilized by various organizations and disciplines, both national and international, and was designed to ensure preservation. The OAIS standard, published in 2005, is considered the optimum standard to create and maintain a digital repository over a long period of time. The Open (“O”) in OAIS represents the “open way the standard was developed,” and does not represent “open access.”

The term OAIS also refers, by extension, to the ISO OAIS Reference Model for an OAIS. This reference model is defined by recommendation CCSDS 650.0-B-2 of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems; this text is identical to ISO 14721:2012. The CCSDS's purview is space agencies, but the OAIS model it developed has proved useful to a wide variety of other organizations and institutions with digital archiving needs.

The information being maintained has been deemed to need "long term preservation," even if the OAIS itself is not permanent. "Long term" is long enough to be concerned with the impacts of changing technologies, including support for new media and data formats, or with a changing user community. "Long term" may extend indefinitely.

The OAIS defines a long period of time as any length of time that might be impacted by changing technologies and the changing of “Designated Community,” e.g., any group of consumers capable of understanding the information. This length of time can be indefinite. The archive defines the community and that definition is not fixed.

The OAIS model can be applied to various archives, e.g., “open access, closed, restricted, “dark,” or proprietary.

The “I” in OAIS represents “information,” meaning data that can be shared or exchanged.