Every information system has a basic infrastructure—services provided no matter what the purpose of the system. Planning and carrying out one essential component of common services, disaster recovery, involves Administration, Common Services, and Archival Storage areas.
Common services is fundamentally a technical service. It is essential to the effective management of an OAIS and requires organizational input on issues such as software selection, negotiating the overall technological infrastructure within which the system operates, and the level and nature of security requirements. The organizational responsibility is to ensure that there is adequate support and guidance, as needed, and to verify that the system is operating effectively.
0101 The OAIS model recognizes differences among three functions:
- Operating system services—enabling and permitting users to interact with the processing units, the input/output devices, and storage devices.
- Network services—providing connection to local parts of the system and to remote sites.
- Security services—making sure that the data, the system, and the environment are safe from accident, intrusion, error, and corruption.
$$$$ Common services costs largely entail software, equipment, and relevant programming costs. Digital preservation should be able to adapt current IT resources as common services are present in any IT system. These may often be unseen costs, but common services are an important, if overlooked, piece of comprehensive digital preservation management.
Exercise
Identify the staff or units who are or would be responsible for managing the common services component of your OAIS.