What is ISO/IEC 23681 about?
ISO/IEC 23681 is an international standard that covers the beneficial aspects of information technology.
ISO/IEC 23681 specifies the Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF) Level 1 and its serialization for LTFS, CDMI, and OpenStack Swift.
ISO/IEC 23681 proposes an approach to digital content preservation that leverages the processes of the archival profession thus helping archivists remain comfortable with the digital domain.
ISO/IEC 23681 gives technicalities like terms, business case, specification overview, container information metadata, object information metadata, serialization for SNIA CDMI, serialization for SNIA LTFS, serialization for OpenStack swift as well as a use case example.
Who is ISO/IEC 23681 for?
ISO/IEC 23681 on Self-contained Information Retention Format is useful for:
- Cloud engineers
- Archivist and record managers
- Open stack swift developers
- LTFS developing Companies
- SIRF developers
Why should you use ISO/IEC 23681?
Many organizations now have a requirement to preserve and maintain access to large volumes of digital content indefinitely into the future. Regulatory compliance and legal issues require the preservation of email archives, medical records, and information about intellectual property. A key challenge to fulfill this need is the creation of vendor-neutral storage containers that can be interpreted over time.
ISO/IEC 23681 proposes an approach to digital content preservation that leverages the processes of the archival profession thus helping the archivists remain comfortable with the digital domain. One of the major needs to make this strategy possible is a digital equivalent to the physical container i.e., the archival box or file folder, that defines a series, and which can be labelled with standard information in a defined format to allow retrieval when needed.
ISO/IEC 23681 goes one step further and details the actual metadata, categories, and elements in the container’s catalog. It also describes how the SIRF logical format is serialized for storage containers in the cloud and for tape-based containers. The SIRF serialization for the cloud is being experimented with OpenStack Swift object storage, and the implementation is offered as open source in the OpenSIRF initiative.
