Archive Standards: How Their Adoption Benefit Archive Systems

Abstract

Electronic archives have much in common: the information must be received, validated, catalogued, stored and made accessible to the consumer. This commonality increases even more as the types of electronic archives converge. In this section we will explore the benefits of employment standards for the development and operations of electronic archives. Although the discussion is applicable to a wide variety of electronic archives, we will focus our discussion in our experience developing and operating large archives of environmental data. We will discuss how the adoption of standards in general and a submission process developed using the recommendations for Space Data System Standards from the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) reference model for and Open Archival Information System (OAIS) has supported the development and operations of a large archive of environmental data.