n.an entity that uses information in a digital archivesOCLC/RLG 2001, 9The OAIS operates in an environment formed by the interaction of four entities: producers, consumers, management, and the archive itself. Producers supply the information that the archive is tasked with preserving. Consumers are those who utilize the preserved information. A special class of consumers is the Designated Community—the subset of consumers who are expected to understand the preserved information in its archived form.CCSDS 2004, 5Consumer: The role played by those persons, or client systems, who interact with OAIS services to find preserved information of interest and to access that information in detail. This can include other OAISs, as well as internal OAIS persons or systems.Lavoie 2014, 10As the name suggests, Consumers are the individuals, organizations, or systems that consume, or use, the information preserved by the OAIS. Consumers interact with an OAIS-type archive in a variety of ways, including queries for assistance, searches, and requests for access to archived information objects. ¶ The reference model defines a special class of Consumers known as the Designated Community: the subset of Consumers expected to independently understand the archived information in the form in which it is preserved and made available by the OAIS.
