Conservation
Long-term conservation is the main goal of PAD. The speed of evolution in IT industry makes difficult to outline a secure framework for data protection. One can not know if architecture is a solid reality, but it is certainly necessary to create a solid architecture, unrelated to products and capable of evolving over time. The PAD system isn’t similar to the institutional repository’s ingestion services. The author provides the main information to the software, able to automatically archive, convert and retrieve all the basic information, linking the duplicate files and reporting any problems. PAD keeps funds separate and has a distributed architecture on seven different areas for storing and processing data.
Virtual machines have been developed that support systems such as MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows NT, Mac OS, Linux. In these machines are installed original programs now obsolete, which allow the opening and viewing of files otherwise not executable with new software.
The files produced by PAD related to the conferment, including the documentation (contract, questionnaire, etc.), are saved in an info area linked to the reference archive.
Security
The PAD architecture is designed to maintain high levels of security in every process. The programs interact automatically with the management software, which is updated manually for the operations performed by the staff. During the conferment PAD uses a mobile device encrypted, formatted and prepared before each use. Upon arrival of the materials, PAD implements the safety procedures with the manual and automatic control of the fund to check for any anomalies. The integrity of the archives is periodically checked with the SHA-1, associated with each fund, directory and file. The copies of the materials located in the treatment and archiving areas have different accesses; the control and monitoring of each conservation site is managed locally by an administrator, so as to ensure that the network’s content is not subject to a single individual’s error. Retention of backup copies in the bank is the responsibility of someone other than the system administrator.
Each fund is autonomous compared to the others, it can be completely deactivated preventing any operation on it. This type of architecture offers a greater guarantee for the management of access rights established by the authors.