Those of you working on repositories may well find the following news and request for feedback from JISC of interest. David Evaluating OAIS The JISC Digital Repositories Programme Support team are currently preparing an evaluation report on the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) as a basis for a generic reference model for repositories, examining the arguments for and against using this model across different types of repositories. The use of OAIS for digital preservation is growing, and work in this area includes a RLG Digital Repositories task force looking at certification and a JISC project looking at disaggregating preservation and repository services. Outside of the digital preservation community, there has been some discussion regarding the wider usefulness of OAIS, including the potential for an OAIS-lite approach to enable smaller organisations or less preservation-focussed repositories to utilise the OAIS model, concepts and terminology. In addition, there has already been useful discussion on this list, and others, about the relationship between preservation and repositories which will be considered in the evaluation. To ensure that the evaluation fully considers the needs of the communities involved, we would like to gather observations or comments about OAIS and its application in this context, or about similar work, please do send them, either on- or off-list. Comments from different communities and domains would be particularly welcome. The impetus for this work was provided by the repositories strand at the JISC-CETIS Conference 2006 and the Support team work element to scope reference models for repositories. References: JISC-CETIS Conference 2006, Repositories strand, report and presentations: http://www.e-framework.org/events/conference/programme/repositories/ Report from the CETIS Metadata and Digital Repositories SIG meeting, 1st March 2006: http://metadata.cetis.ac.uk/sig_meetings/HEAMar2006/ Report from a DPC Briefing on OAIS, 4th April 2006: http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/events/060404dpcbriefing.html Further information is available on the Digital Repositories Programme wiki: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/OAIS and http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Reference_models Sherpa DP: http://ahds.ac.uk/about/projects/sherpa-dp/index.html Many thanks, Julie -- Julie Allinson JISC Digital Repositories Support Officer UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY Tel: 0845 1579436 / ++44 (0) 1225 386580 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/