Future Work

Patterns

Each of these sets of patterns is drawn from my own experience of working in digital preservation, in service delivery and research projects. But the world of digital preservation is much larger than that, so the question is what have I missed.

If your experiences cut across these classification (or if you think there are flaws in the whole approach!) please let me know.

In this paper we have used the idea of design patterns as a way of capturing different choices that can be made when implementing a digital preservation process, focussing on overall information flow. The same tactic could also be applied to other aspects of digital preservation, such as:

• Communities: can we identify different classes of communities and environments, helping us understand how to engage with them?

• Ownership: is the archive part of the organisation that own the records, or do we hold records on behalf of others? How does this change what we need to do?

• Assessing Preservation Actions: what are the different meanings of Significant Properties, and what other methods can we used to assess our interventions?

• Archival Packaging Patterns: what are the different approaches to defining information packages.

• System Architectures: what are the different ways we can implement the OAIS functional requirements, i.e. which system or systems covering which functions?