OPEX and PAX: A transfer format for digital preservation content
Jonathan Tilbury Richard Smith
There are several existing standards for transferring content into and out of Digital Preservation systems, whether for ingest, access or system migration. These standards however have shortfalls relating to their ability to handle migrated digital content, complex digital objects, and deep and wide data structures, and are often highly prescriptive, creating a high barrier to usage.

The paper describes two formats to better align with modern, flexible, transfer and ingest use cases, the Open Preservation Exchange (OPEX) format, a flexible way of structuring content for modular transfer; and the Preservation Asset Exchange (PAX) format, a vendor-independent format for multi-part or preserved digital assets. These allow producers of new content (e.g. digitization providers), preservation systems (which produce and consume content) and consumers to transfer data containing the information relevant to their use case, including complex and preserved content.
Keywords – Content, Transfer, Data model, Complex objects
metadata standards and implementation from document to data