OAIS

OAIS is a model, not a product. It does not tell an institution which software to buy; it names the roles, responsibilities, and structures any trustworthy archive must have, and gives the field a shared vocabulary for them. Three roles anchor it: the producer, who creates and submits material; the archive, which preserves it; and the designated community — the future readers the archive commits to keeping the material understandable for.

Its best-known contribution is the package vocabulary. A submission information package (SIP) is what a producer hands over. An archival information package (AIP) is what the archive stores — the content plus everything needed to preserve and understand it. A dissemination information package (DIP) is what a user receives on request. The letters matter less than the demand behind them: every package must be self-describing, carrying its own metadata, provenance, fixity, and rights.

For anyone producing documentation, OAIS’s practical meaning is upstream. What an archive can preserve depends on what the producer hands over; a submission assembled from an orderly production — controlled names, versions, checksums, cleared rights — can be ingested without a phone call, while a drive of leftovers forces the archive to reconstruct intent it never witnessed. The current edition of the standard is ISO 14721:2025.