Archiving in the networked world: interoperability

The purpose of this article is to discuss the importance of, and problems with, interoperability along long term digital archiving systems.

The article reviews the literature about interoperability and takes an engineering‐oriented look at implementation within the LuKII project. It also draws heavily on actual experience in the LuKII (LOCKSS und KOPAL Infrastructure und Interoperabilität) project.

The need for interoperation is well established, but the implementation requires significant technical work to define and test key aspects of interoperability.

The need for interoperation among digital archiving systems is very much there, but achieving it is hard. Systems built at different times and along different principles require a degree of reengineering that can test the skills (and sometimes the patience) of the creators. Interoperability also requires fresh thinking about how archiving systems can reasonably measure important abstract concepts like integrity and authenticity.