PILARS

The Protocols for Implementing Long-term Archival Repository Services (PILARS, http://w3id.org/ldac/pilars) are inspired by the continuing success of the technical approach taken over two decades by PARADISEC. PARADISEC houses cultural heritage material from more than 1360 languages with standard metadata, with data stored in commodity services (initially files on disk, now objects in a cloud storage service), and metadata adjacent to the data. PILARS was developed through work with the Language Data Commons of Australia to generalise the PARADISEC approach to other disciplines.

PILARS is aimed at IT practitioners, archivists, librarians, researchers and infrastructure managers involved in long-term data management. The protocols are intended to be complementary to the existing practices and principles of those disciplines.

Rationale

In a research context it is important to be able to support the FAIR principles, ensuring that data is well described by metadata, is identified with persistent identifiers, and that shared services with good governance are in place to store interoperable data, to make it findable and provide appropriate access controls.

These protocols could form the basis for design, evaluation or procurement of archival repository-services, but also allow for data custodians to begin organising data in a format ready for archiving and digital preservation as long as they have access to some kind of commodity storage, by using a range of tools.

The PILARS Protocols call for the implementation of a linked-data metadata standard for describing data; RO-Crate represents one option for this.