NDSA:Archive Interoperability
Independent Archives (page 6-2, 2009 Pink Book)
OAIS Description
An independent archive is assumed to serve only a single Designated Community. The archive and the Designated Community must agree on the design of SIPs, DIPs, and Finding Aids. An independent archive may choose to design these structures based on formal or de- facto standards, which would allow cooperation with other archives that implement the same standards. However, the design decisions to use these standards are not based on the possibility of inter-operation with other archives, but rather on local requirements and cost savings.
Cooperative Archives (page 6-3, 2009 Pink Book)
OAIS Description
Cooperating archives are based on standards agreements among two or more archives. The simplest form of cooperation between archives is when one archive acts as a Consumer of material from another archive. In this case the consuming archive must support the DIP format of the producing archive as a SIP format. Cooperating archives have related communities of interest, so they order and ingest data from other cooperating archives and possibly have common data Producers. No common access, submission or dissemination standards are assumed. The only requirement for this architecture is that the cooperating groups support at least one common SIP and DIP format for inter-archive requests. The control mechanism for this sort of inter-operation can be Event Based Order requests at each archive.
Federated Archives (page 6-4, 2009 Pink Book)
OAIS Description
Federated Archives are conceptually Consumer-oriented. In addition to the Local Community (i.e., the original Designated Community served by the archive), there exists a Global community (i.e., an extended Designated Community) which has interests in the holdings of several OAIS archives and has influenced those archives to provide access to their holdings via one or more common finding aids. However, the Local Consumers are likely to have access priority over the global Consumers.
OAIS Description
In an association involving archives with shared functional areas, Management has entered into agreements with archives to share or integrate functional areas. The motive for this may be to share expensive resources such as hierarchical file management system for Archival Storage, peripheral device for Ingest or dissemination of Information Packages or supercomputers for complicated transformations between SIPs, AIPs or DIPs. This association is fundamentally different from the previous examples, in that it is no longer possible to ignore the internal architecture of the archive.