In "Repository Preservation Revisited," Chris Rusbridge, Director of the Digital Curation Centre, discusses the findings of some informal surveys he conducted about how long institutional repository items should be preserved.
Here's an excerpt:
Note, I would not draw any conclusions from the actual numerical votes on their own, but perhaps we can from the values within each group. However, ever hasty if not foolhardy, here are my own tentative interpretations:
- First, even "experts" are alarmed at the potential implications of the term "OAIS."
- Second, repository managers don’t believe that keeping resources accessible and/or usable for 10 years (in the context of the types of material they currently manage in repositories) will give them major problems.
- Third, repository managers don't identify "accessibility and/or usability of its contents for the long term" as implying the mechanisms of an OAIS (this is perhaps rather a stretch given my second conclusion).
