The design of the VERS encapsulated object experience with an archival information package

In this paper, the information package (IP) used within the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) is described. The VERS IP was designed in 1999 to support the long-term preservation of digital information and has been implemented in government agencies and it is the basis of the Public Record Office Victoria's digital archive. Its key feature is the use of a self-documenting encapsulation. The encapsulation binds the content information to be preserved and its metadata into a single object that can survive independently of an archival system. The self-documentation ensures that the content can be manually extracted from the encapsulation using only the simplest tools. The VERS IP is compared with the IP defined in the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) and the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS).