archivalfriendly

Archivalfriendly is a term used to describe content, systems, and practices that are designed to endure and remain accessible to future users and archivists. In digital preservation, archivalfriendly materials typically adhere to open, non-proprietary formats, explicit and machine-readable licensing, thorough metadata, and clearly documented provenance, combined with strategies for long-term storage, integrity checks, and planned format migration.

Key criteria include the use of stable open formats rather than proprietary ones; explicit rights statements; comprehensive metadata (including provenance, technical and rights metadata); integrity safeguards such as checksums or fixity data; robust packaging and transfer methods (for example BagIt); persistent identifiers; and documented preservation planning, including migration paths or emulation strategies.

Applications and domains: archivalfriendly practices are common in digital libraries, institutional repositories, university data archives, government records offices, and archival web collections. They apply to individual files, entire collections, software, datasets, and even web assets prepared for capture and storage.

Benefits and challenges: adopting archivalfriendly practices enhances long-term accessibility and authenticity, but it requires selecting appropriate formats, ensuring rights clearance, and dedicating resources for metadata creation and ongoing preservation. Not every item can be archivalgrade, but these practices improve the likelihood of future access and reuse.

Related standards and concepts include open formats, metadata schemas (Dublin Core, PREMIS), packaging formats (BagIt, METS), and persistent identifiers (DOI, ARK), as well as preservation workflows and governance.