8
Archiving
The goal of archiving is to preserve data for long periods of time. With the increasing digitalisation of information and data, digital archiving is quickly gaining in importance. People want to preserve digital photos, music and films for following generations. Companies are obligated to archive business documents for years, decades or even longer in order to fulfil regulatory requirements. This chapter presents an overview of the basic requirements and concepts of digital archiving.
To begin our discussion on archiving we will first differentiate between the terms that are used in the archiving environment (Section 8.1). We then introduce reasons, basic conditions and requirements for archiving (Section 8.2). This leads us to implementation considerations (Section 8.3) and the necessity for interfaces between different components of archive systems (Section 8.4). Lastly, we present archive solutions for different areas of application (Section 8.5) and look at the organisational and operational aspects of archiving (Section 8.6).
8.1 TERMINOLOGY
We will explain the basic terms and relationships of archiving for the purposes of developing a uniform vocabulary for this chapter. We first differentiate between ‘information’ and ‘data’ (Section 8.1.1) and define the terms ‘archiving’ (Section 8.1.2) and ‘digital archiving’ (Section 8.1.3). This is followed by a reference architecture for digital archive systems (Section 8.4). Lastly, we also make a distinction between ...
