July 2025 – Webinar
Learn how OCFL can help enhance your digital repository and your digital preservation workflows through versioning, efficient storage, and repository traceability.
This eArchiving Initiative training webinar begins with a brief overview of the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) to introduce its background, objectives, and relevance for digital preservation. It then explores how OCFL can be used to enable versioning of Archival Information Packages (AIPs) and support the creation of delta AIPs—incremental updates that capture only the differences between versions.
A real-world implementation example of E-ARK Web showcases how OCFL is used in practice to manage AIP versioning and delta packages within the reference implementation. Additional cases discuss a range of other use cases where OCFL can enhance solution-independent storage and management of AIPs:
- Incremental updates in dynamic collections: In actively updated repositories, OCFL enables storage of only the changes between AIP versions, reducing both storage requirements and processing overhead.
- Recording changes and creating lightweight delta AIPs: OCFL allows efficient tracking of preservation actions, such as metadata updates, without duplicating unchanged content.
- Enhanced traceability and provenance: OCFL’s structured versioning makes it easy to follow the evolution of AIPs over time, without needing to analyse internal metadata.
- Support for fixity verification and recovery: Versioned AIPs support integrity checks and rollback capabilities, enabling recovery from data corruption without full restores.
- Repository migration, optimised synchronisation, and replication: Delta AIPs simplify repository migration and enable more efficient data transfer across distributed or replicated preservation systems.
- Minimising data handling for risk reduction: By isolating and preserving only changed components of AIPs, OCFL reduces unnecessary manipulation of stable data, lowering the risk of inadvertent corruption, loss, or operational error.
This webinar was presented by Neil Jefferies of the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) and Sven Schlarb of AIT/eArchiving Initiative on Thursday, 17 July 2025.
Please note: there is no spoken audio in the first three slides of this webinar. Audio begins at 00:34.
To download the slides of this webinar click here