The eArchiving Building Block supported by The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) and the European Commission (EC) creates common specifications based on pre-existing standards that everyone can use to transfer data. eArchiving aims to provide the core specifications, software, training and knowledge to help data creators, software developers, and digital archives tackle the challenge of short, medium and long-term data management and reuse in a sustainable, authentic, cost-efficient, manageable and interoperable way. The birth took place in 2018 and was a long one ending in 2019. The result was several specifications for the different types of information packages found in the OAIS Reference model and Content Information Type Specifications (CITS) for structuring the content to be placed in the package. Tools were also developed, but let’s focus on the foundation, the specifications. In November 2019, a new two-year project named E-ARK3 was started, and is developing more specifications and enhancing those created previosuly. But where does this winding path take us? To more specifications and more data to transfer? The path will become more and more convoluted the longer we get on the journey of describing data as content in a content information type specification.

Figure 2. The eArchiving building block and its services and specifications.