[David Giaretta]

I hope the following will be of interest.
Regards
..David
Dr David Giaretta
Who can be trusted with your precious information for years to come?
Much of our lives and our futures depend on digital information yet the
“father of the internet” Vint Cerf [1] worries about the coming “digital
dark age”. How can we know who can be trusted with our digital future?
Now there is a way to do it in the same way we know which systems we can
trust for food, environment, energy, namely through ISO certification by ISO
accredited audit organisations. The standard in this case is ISO 16363,
based on ISO 14721 which is better known as OAIS, the fundamental standard
of digital preservation used throughout the world.
The first organisation in the world to receive accreditation for ISO 16363
for Trustworthy Digital Repositories is the Primary Trustworthy Digital
Repository Authorisation Body Ltd (PTAB), based in Dorset, UK. PTAB is now
listed in the Register of Certification Bodies of National Accreditation
Board for Certification Bodies (NABCB) under registration number TD 001
after the extensive accreditation process.
As a result, PTAB is authorized to audit digital repositories worldwide and,
when appropriate, certify that they are trustworthy.
The PTAB international team members, each recognized for their expertise in
digital preservation, authored ISO 16363 and many also authored ISO 14721
(OAIS), the fundamental standard for digital preservation.
For more information visit the website at
http://www.iso16363.org/iso-certification/, email
***@***.*** or
phone Dr David Giaretta, PTAB Director, on +447770326304.
Notes
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31450389
Trustworthiness in a global context
Establishing clear criteria to identify trustworthy repositories has been
recognized as early as 2002 as vital to ensure that our valuable digitally
encoded information will continue to be understandable and usable. Claims of
trustworthiness are easy to make but until now have been difficult to
justify or objectively prove. In 2007 a working group that included many of
the authors of OAIS (ISO 14721) began developing additional standards to
address this need: ISO 16363 lists criteria a trustworthy digital repository
should meet, ISO 16919 provides requirements for the organizations that will
carry out audits and certifications of digital repositories. These two
standards, together with ISO 17021-1, provide the instrument for auditing
candidate trustworthy digital repositories in an internationally agreed way
in the same way that so many aspects of our lives depend on ISO
certification for example in food safety, information security and
environmental management systems. International agreements ensure that
certifications are recognized around the world.
OAIS: the fundamental standard of digital preservation
Long before it first became an approved standard in 2002, many repositories
had adopted the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) (ISO 14721) as a
reference model to better understand what would be needed from digital
preservation systems. Institutions began to declare themselves
‘OAIS-compliant’ to underscore the trustworthiness of their digital
repositories. However, there was no established understanding of
‘OAIS-compliance’ beyond being able to apply OAIS terminology to describe
their archive. ISO 16363
ISO accreditation
The international system for accreditation of management systems is based on
* ISO/IEC 17021-1:2015 – Requirements for bodies providing audit and
certification of management systems — Part 1: Requirements
This is specialised by
* ISO 16919:2014 – Requirements for bodies providing audit and
certification of candidate trustworthy digital repositories. This can be
downloaded free from
https://public.ccsds.org/Pubs/652x1m2.pdf
The standard which supplies the details of what auditors must examine is
* ISO 16363:2012 – Audit and certification of trustworthy digital
repositories. This can be downloaded free from
https://public.ccsds.org/Pubs/652x0m1.pdf
The fundamental standard for digital preservation is
* ISO 14721:2012 – Reference Model for an Open Archival Information
System (OAIS). This is available free from
https://public.ccsds.org/Pubs/650x0m2.pdf

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