Long-term digital preservation at the Publications Office of the European Union

This document provides an overview of long-term digital preservation at the Publications Office of the European Union (OP). Decision 2009/496/EC on the organisation and operation of the Publications Office of the European Union mandates the OP to publish and to preserve ‘the publications of the institutions of the European Communities and the European Union’. The definition of ‘publication’ has since been refined in consultation with the EU institutions in the context of the EU Legal Deposit scheme. According to this new definition, a publication is ‘any material authored or made public either by or upon the order of an EU institution or its official representative as part of their service and with a primary purpose of being disseminated to a public external to the EU institutions’. In line with this mandate, the OP’s long-term digital preservation service has developed a vision, which is to ensure that EU publications are preserved in digital format in a secure and trustworthy manner that remains accessible and authentic over time, in order to preserve the knowledge and content of the EU institutions for current and future generations of citizens. It does this through the provision of a dedicated digital archival repository built around international, open and widely adopted standards. Publications are preserved together with their metadata, including both descriptive metadata, representation information and provenance metadata. The OP’s long-term digital preservation service is supervised by an interinstitutional committee that approves the content of this document and monitors its implementation. In order to help ensure that the OP’s long-term digital preservation service meets the requirements of its stakeholders and, in particular, the requirements that are considered state of the art in the domain of long-term digital preservation, the digital preservation plan contains a set of key performance indicators. These are measured on a regular basis and will be monitored by the steering committee.