The significant properties are tailored on the user requirements of the Designated Community, namely, the EU Institutions, the private archives as producers of content, and the end-users, that is all EU citizens interested in accessing the contents preserved by the DPS.
Through a specific Governing Board (GB) the DPS will guarantee for the deposited digital contents, the maintenance and respect of any issues related to content collection, ownership, copyright, intellectual property, privacy, provenance, security, disaster recovery, legal constraints and ethical principles.
The DPS will be deployed alongside the existing Historical Archive System and Current Archive System and interfaces with both of them in order to exchange data. The focus on digital preservation of a variety of primary historical sources, either digitally born or digitized paper materials, aims to provide academics and researchers with online access to a unique selection of official documents, handwritten texts, emails, photographs and audio and video tracks. These so-called ‘digital holdings’ will be stored on the IT infrastructure physically located in the EUI premises and designed to preserve these sources indefinitely.
The HAEU faces the challenge of long term prospective of its DPS knowledge base with a two-step approach policy:
DPS mission and objectives have been clarified in terms of the current Designated Community, the content collection description, significant properties (e.g., identification, authenticity, integrity, provenance) and relations with other objects, then the current user requirements and the type of service have been described. Obviously all these elements can change in time or coverage, thus an appropriate policy to monitor and update them is put in execution.
The instruments and procedures to develop a ‘trusted digital repository’ were identified (and are under development) in line with the most relevant worldwide criteria and recommendations of the Trusted Digital Repositories guidelines and standards, like the ISO 14721 (OAIS), the PREMIS and the ISO 16363. As clear roles and responsibilities architecture are defined, a Governing Board is set up, while a written IT strategy for LTDP, security plan, and a risk assessment procedure is established with a scheduled check and audit calendar. While IT technologies are intrinsically limited in time, a long term strategy implies that the choice of the most suitable technologies, the definition of the control/updating procedures of technologies, and the definition of the procedures to refresh and verify the data integrity, shall offer guarantees for undetermined preservation.
Last but not least the DPS will distinguish between the following classes of security management procedures and technologies, for both of them it implements appropriate technologies and controls: perimeter security, including for example security of the data farm access, password policy, user authentication and authorization function, firewall, anti-intrusion control; data integrity, including for example all the checksum and protection technologies, antivirus, fire protection, backup and remote copying, recovery procedures; cybersecurity.