Standards for Digital Libraries and Archives: Digital Longevity

There is a lack of durable thinking on digital longevity. For this we require cross-domain communication and acceptation of standardized concepts, procedures, document formats and IT-tools. Four kinds of standards are required for preservation of digital documents over an indefinite period of time: standards for the architecture, document format standards for preservation, metadata standards for preservation of the access and standards for interoperability. This article describes concisely the relevant standards and comments on their related longevity aspects. It concludes by explaining how the identified ‘standard-domains’ can be used to create software building blocks (IT-tools) of merged standards, gaining a higher level of recognition and enabling easy communication, acceptance, reuse and reduced development costs. Component Based Development (CBD) is indicated as a suitable system development methodology in order to create such building blocks for a digital Record Keeping System (RKS) based on these standards.