Astronomy looks after its data better than most disciplines, and it is no
coincidence that the consensus standard for the archival preservation of all
types of digital assets -- the OAIS Reference Model -- emerged originally from
the space science community.
It is useful to highlight both what is different about astronomy (and indeed
about Big Science in general), what could be improved, and what is exemplary,
and in the process I will give a brief introduction to the framework of the
OAIS model, and its useful conceptual vocabulary. I will illustrate this with a
discussion of the spectrum of big-science data management practices from
astronomy, through gravitational wave (GW) data, to particle physics.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, to appear in proceedings of ADASS XX; corresponds
to LIGO document P100017