Barriers to Implementation
The Uneven Life of Digital Preservation Standards
It began not in a plenary hall but in a quiet room on the sidelines of iPRES 2025 in Wellington. A Birds of a Feather discussion gathered a few dozen practitioners, policy leads, and system developers who wanted to talk about standards—not the headlines or the grand strategies, but the small, persistent struggles of trying to make them work. The conversation circled around familiar names—OAIS, ISO 16363, PREMIS, and especially the newly published METS 2.0—and a shared realization: the community’s frameworks for trustworthy preservation are sound, but the pathways for implementation remain uneven.
Across the world of archives, libraries, and records programs, the call for digital preservation is universal. The standards exist, they are mature, and they reflect decades of collective labor. OAIS provides one shared conceptual model for describing preservation systems and information flows. ISO 16363 explains how to demonstrate that those systems are trustworthy. Around them orbit related frameworks: ISO 23081 for metadata, ISO 30301 for governance, PREMIS for events and technical provenance, and the METS schema for packaging digital objects. Together they form the scaffolding of modern digital preservation. Yet translating them into practice continues to expose the same structural and operational barriers that have slowed progress for twenty years.
A Framework Built on Promise
The architecture of digital preservation is intellectually coherent. OAIS serves as a reference model, establishing a shared vocabulary—Ingest, Archival Storage, Preservation Planning, Access—without dictating a specific system design. ISO 16363 builds on that framework by transforming principles into measurable criteria for governance, staffing, sustainability, and risk management.
METS has long filled the space between concept and implementation. It provides the mechanism for binding content files, descriptive and administrative metadata, and structural hierarchies into a single, machine-readable package. For many repositories, METS serves as a practical expression of the OAIS information package concept — a widely adopted way of realizing Archival Information Packages in operational systems.
As several participants in the Birds of a Feather session observed, the standards themselves are rarely the problem. The difficulty lies in keeping them aligned as technology and practice evolve. OAIS defines trust. ISO 16363 measures it. METS, PREMIS, and related schemas operationalize it. But because these standards evolve at different tempos and under different governance structures, harmonization is a constant challenge. The message in that room was unmistakable: digital preservation needs as much maintenance as the digital objects it protects.
Where Implementation Falters
Governance remains the most persistent barrier. Digital preservation often sits outside formal risk frameworks, treated as a technical function rather than an organisational obligation. This separation weakens accountability and isolates practitioners from budgetary and policy decision-making. Even where strategies exist, they are frequently static—documents of intent rather than tools for coordination.
Technology magnifies these difficulties. OAIS and ISO 16363 are intentionally abstract, and implementing them demands local interpretation. That interpretive space can empower innovation or invite inconsistency. The release of METS 2.0 has brought this dynamic into sharp relief.
The update represents years of thoughtful revision. It simplifies XML structures, removes deprecated features, improves namespace clarity, and enhances alignment with PREMIS and schema.org. For those maintaining repositories, it resolves long-standing pain points: excessive nesting, verbose linking, and limited semantic extensibility. Yet even this positive evolution imposes a transition cost. Systems must be updated, crosswalks rebuilt, and validation tools rewritten. As one participant observed, “simplification still costs money.”
Many implementers remain tied to older repository platforms that have not yet adopted METS 2.0. Vendors, meanwhile, wait for clients to request support before investing in development. It is a slow feedback loop in which technical innovation advances faster than the capacity to absorb it. This tension between progress and practicality defines the current moment of digital preservation.
Human capacity and culture compound these challenges. Digital preservation requires multidisciplinary fluency in metadata, system architecture, and archival principles. Training pipelines are improving but remain limited, especially for small and mid-sized institutions. Standards documentation often assumes specialist knowledge, leaving newcomers dependent on community blogs, GitHub repositories, or informal mentoring networks. As one attendee noted, “the first obstacle to implementing standards is finding them, and the second is understanding them.”
The economic dimension underlies them all. Preservation requires continuous funding, not episodic investment. The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation framed this paradox years ago: everyone values continuity, but few can pay for it. Certification under ISO 16363 brings structure and legitimacy but can exceed available resources. For many, aligning with the principles is achievable; achieving formal compliance is not.
When Regulation Meets Reality
Legal frameworks add further complexity. Copyright restrictions may prohibit migration or normalization. Privacy and data-protection laws may conflict with archival mandates. Jurisdictional uncertainty around cloud storage continues to grow.
The Wellington discussion added another layer to this picture: the accessibility of the standards infrastructure itself. Several attendees pointed out that while METS and PREMIS are freely available, ISO standards are not, creating an uneven playing field. Institutions that cannot afford access to ISO documents are excluded from full participation in compliance efforts. One participant described this as “a standards gap masquerading as an access problem.”
Others raised concerns about the fragility of online schema repositories. During government shutdowns or network outages, the URLs that point to METS or PREMIS schema files can become temporarily unreachable, interrupting validation workflows. The group argued that redundancy—mirrored repositories, distributed hosting, and long-term preservation of schemas—is essential if the standards infrastructure is to embody its own principles.
Toward a More Coherent Ecosystem
The conversation frequently returned to METS 2.0 as both a symbol and a case study. Its revision exemplifies the community’s ability to modernize while respecting legacy data. At the same time, it underscores how coordination between standardization groups could be improved. PREMIS, for instance, continues to evolve separately under its own editorial committee. OAIS is revised through ISO processes on a slower cycle. Without deliberate harmonization, these timelines diverge and practitioners are left to fill the gaps.
Participants at iPRES agreed that the field needs a clearer map of relationships across standards. OAIS, PREMIS, METS, EAD, PDF/A, and the emerging Record in Contexts model each have distinct histories and design logics. Yet their boundaries blur in practice. METS can point to PREMIS events, wrap EAD descriptions, and reference PDF/A objects—all while remaining invisible to users. A horizontal crosswalk describing these interconnections would help implementers understand where overlap is intentional and where it is accidental.
That idea has now moved into action within ISO/TC 46 SC 11, where a new ad hoc group is examining how digital preservation standards interact and where they might be better aligned. The group’s mandate is exploratory, not normative. Its task is to listen, document, and clarify rather than legislate. If successful, its work could serve as a bridge between conceptual frameworks and technical schemas, ensuring that future revisions—whether to OAIS, PREMIS, or METS—evolve in concert rather than in isolation.
Barriers to ISO Participation
The discussion also turned toward the structural barriers that limit participation in the ISO standardization process itself. Several practitioners admitted that while they rely on ISO standards daily, they have little visibility into how those standards are created or revised. For many, the barrier is not interest but infrastructure.
Cost is the most obvious obstacle. National standards bodies often charge membership or access fees that are prohibitive for small institutions, independent professionals, and practitioners in developing regions. Even reading the standards under discussion can require purchasing documents individually—an expense that compounds over time.
Representation is another concern. The process of drafting and balloting ISO standards typically involves national mirror committees, which vary widely in composition and activity. Some are active and inclusive; others are dormant or dominated by a narrow professional community. Participants noted that this inconsistency can leave vital practitioner voices unheard, especially from cultural heritage sectors that lack formal industry representation.
Transparency and visibility also emerged as issues. The workflow of ISO development—the stages of drafts, the cadence of votes, and the channels for public comment—is not always intuitive. Without clear communication from national bodies, potential contributors struggle to find entry points. One attendee described it as “a system designed for institutions, not individuals.”
Language and time add further complexity. English remains the working language for most committees, limiting participation from those for whom it is not native. Meetings often occur in time zones that disadvantage contributors from the Global South. As one observer summarized, “the door is technically open, but the hallway is long.”
These structural realities shape who participates and, by extension, whose perspectives are reflected in the standards. The Birds of a Feather discussion underscored that diversity of geography, institution type, and professional background is not only a matter of fairness but of quality. Broader participation strengthens relevance, reduces bias, and ensures that standards reflect the real conditions of implementation. Addressing these barriers, participants agreed, is as important as aligning the standards themselves.
Themes That Tie the Barriers Together
Across all these observations, several themes recur. Trust remains the foundation of digital preservation, but achieving it requires sustained transparency and technical interoperability. Scalability and equity divide the field: well-resourced institutions move toward certification while others improvise within their means. Environmental sustainability has become an ethical as well as practical concern. Every mirrored copy carries a carbon cost, and long-term stewardship now demands ecological as well as technical justification.
Most importantly, the field is shifting from compliance to capability. Standards exist to support stewardship, not constrain it. Their success lies in enabling context-specific application. METS, in particular, illustrates this balance—rigid enough to ensure interoperability, flexible enough to adapt to local metadata regimes. The future of standards work will hinge on maintaining that equilibrium.
Charting a Way Forward
The way forward requires collaboration, not proliferation. Institutions can strengthen governance by embedding preservation within enterprise information frameworks and aligning it with broader risk management. Modular, open-source tools based on shared schemas like METS 2.0 can lower barriers and promote interoperability. Training and mentorship programs must continue to expand, cultivating professionals who can navigate both archival values and technical realities. Funding models must shift toward sustained operations rather than project-based surges.
Within the standards community, the SC 11 ad hoc group’s mapping effort offers an opportunity to align conceptual and technical standards more closely. Practical deliverables—publicly accessible repositories, harmonized schema documentation, open validation tools, and more inclusive participation pathways—would make compliance less opaque and more achievable. Preservation cannot advance through rules alone; it advances through use.
From Compliance to Capability
The challenge facing digital preservation is not the absence of standards but the difficulty of applying them cohesively. Compliance can be certified, but capability must be practiced. Institutions that treat standards as evolving tools—updating, integrating, and preserving them alongside their collections—will define the next chapter of trustworthy digital stewardship.
That quiet room in Wellington captured the essence of this moment. The future of preservation will not be written through new frameworks but through the careful maintenance of the ones we already share. The work ahead is to make them coherent, accessible, and, above all, livable.