Supporting Analysis and Audit of Collaborative OAIS’s by use of an Outer OAIS – Inner OAIS (OO-IO) Model

This paper addresses the question: What would distributed digital preservation look like using the OAIS Reference Model? The challenge is the need for several organizations to cooperate to achieve distributed digital preservation; using replication, independence, and coordination to address the known threats to digital content through time. The main purpose of the paper is to present an Outer OAIS-Inner OAIS (OO-IO) Model that can support the analysis and audit of collaborative interactions between multiple OAIS’s to enable distributed digital preservation. The paper provides extensive explanations and diagrams to demonstrate the ability of the OO-IO model to address distributed digital preservation conformance with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. It is argued that the OO-IO model contributes a necessary extension to the literature of the digital preservation community to address the analysis and audit necessary for distributed digital preservation.