ESSArch Digital Archive Concept
The mission of the ESSArch Digital Archive Concept is to provide an open source based solution for long-term preservation of digital information. It is cost effective, reliable, storage independent and easy to integrate into your existing environment. It is based on well known open standards and methods.
Why ESSArch?
- Cost effective – is an open source based solution for long-term preservation of digital entitys
- Storage independent - can store digital archival entitys in any type of storage such as Tape librarys, SAN disksystem, Object based storage (CAS, storage cluster cloud) among other storage architectures
- Easy to integrate – can easily be integrated with existing archival information systems
- Reliable - guarantees that all files deposited by agreement with its affiliates remains authentic, available, unaltered, and readable from media.
- Based on open standards and methods – OAIS, METS, PREMIS, MIX among others …
- Licensed GPLv3
ESSArch - The Concept
ESSArch is based on OAIS (Open Archival Information System, ISO 14721:2003) and further on developed to include both PreIngest and PreAccess functions, Storage Methodes and flexibility to add any metadata standard required. The main conceptual functions are based on traditional archiving preservation processes.
ESSArch - the platform
- ESSArch is a practical implementation of OAIS (Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System) and includes PreIngest, Ingest, Data Management, Archival Storage, Access and PreAccess. ESSArch is managed by Archive Management and Management Regulations
- ESSArch is a Python application designed to run in a Unix/Linux environment.
- ESSArch uses METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) descriptors for all information packages. METS is an XML document format. More information about METS is available from the Library of Congress
- ESSArch uses PREMIS (Preservation Metadata and Maintenance Activity) together with METS to describe events and technical metadata for datafiles. More information about PREMIS is available from the Library of Congress
- ESSArch uses HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) as one interface to communicate with thru a traditionell web reader
- ESSArch uses XMLRPC (XML Remote Procedure Call) as another interface to communicate with ESSArch
- ESSArch also uses W3C SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) as another communication interface
- ESSArch is built upon MySQL databases where ESSArch stores information to manage the information packages.
- ESSArch contains several storage methods where ESSArch stores the information packages. ESSArch can natively write to a Unix filesystem or a Tape library. In future release it is planned to support Object based storage (CAS, storage cluster cloud)