Long-term Data Management in the SAO RAS Archive System

The Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SAO RAS) has an archival system which contains heterogeneous digital collections with observations, obtained on the different instruments of the observatory since 1994. For a sufficiently long period of existence of the archive there have been significant changes in data formats, data processing methods and storage of information. To date, the archive capacity is 1.5 TB. By modern standards, it is a small archive, but most of the observatories in the world produce archives of a similar volume and content. The most pressing data management tasks in any archive include validation of data, ingestion, access, long-term preservation with support for timely migrations to new data media. Standardization of these stages, the creation of software on the base of the standards for the entire community, can be a good help for such archive providers, whose capabilities in terms of software development are often limited because of the small size of a team and the necessary level of training.