Building an Electronic Records Archive at the National Archives and Records Administration Recommendations for Initial Development (2003) / Chapter Skim
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4 Designing and Engineering the ERA
4 Designing and Engineering the ERA
Pages 24-34
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From page 24... ...
To meet these goals He ERA will have to be engineered properly. Key elements of an engineering approach include expressing program objectives and constraints, measuring or estimating key parameters, defining realistic requirements, and making pragmatic engineering design decisions.
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From page 25... ...
In what forms do records currently exist c.g., which data types, on what storage media, and with what kinds of supporting documentation or online metadata? If there is an inventory of digital records "waiting in the wings" to be archived, what are the properties of these collections?
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From page 26... ...
While today's and future records can be delivered to NARA using secure networking techniques, records generated over the past 30 years or less may reside on media that are rapidly becoming obsolete. How many records are stored on which media?
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From page 27... ...
It may not be cost-effective for NARA to provide online access facilities for obscure data types, but users should be able to retrieve the original bits and use their own resources to manipulate them. For example, it is perfectly reasonable that NARA might be able to easily provide full-text search capabilities for some types of record but not for others.2 Another example: NARA might fairly easily provide services for viewing, manipulating)
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From page 28... ...
Must NARA build the entire ERA or might other government organizations, commercial firms, and individual researchers fulfill parts of the ERA's mission? We committee recommends that NARA define its essential mission quite narrowly, with an emphasis on saving ctigital records in their original form together with appropriate metadata and providing access to those records In their original form (the original bits)
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From page 29... ...
All of these considerations imply setting appropriate expectations for the ERA. An archive accessible to the public, in which every record can be presented through a Web browser (or whatever is the preferred public access technique of the day)
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From page 30... ...
They may, for example, wish to verify the accuracy of preferred derived forms or the results obtained through migration or emulation. To support the researcher of the future, the ERA should strive to save the information that will be essential to future reverse engineers: software operating manuals, documentation on data types, and source code when it's available.6 In some cases, it will also be useful to save executable cocle associated with the record, to be available for future emulation.
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From page 31... ...
In many cases it is advisable to save derived forms of the record as well in order to facilitate various forms of access. For example, anticipating a need to make visual presentations of a record, it might be advantageous to prepare, at ingest, a PDF version of a word-processing document; then an access module need only know how to render PDF files rather than how to decode each wordprocessor data type used for the original records.
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From page 32... ...
An XML (or other format) derived form may, however, be a very useful adjunct to saving the original data type, as discusser} above.
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From page 33... ...
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From page 34... ...
The full set of external references required to support the emulation approach includes the files required to install the application, operating system, and other supporting facilities on bare hardware. These are all implicit external references that would need to be preserved in a software repository, perhaps as part of the ERA or perhaps shared with other digital archives.
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