POD Principles

• Library services are increasingly and inherently data driven, and therefore data aggregation and analysis are operational services as well as strategic concerns.

• POD will benefit the marketplace and community for data aggregation by providing an open, distributed, low-cost alternative to the otherwise unconstrained and increasingly consolidated market of commercial services.

• POD is modular and open in its architecture both internally for resilience, and externally to complementary solutions which accommodate data and enrichments from multiple sources.

• POD employs a lightweight infrastructure that will enables institutions to “come as they are'' instead of requiring data standards that are onerous to agree on, effect, and audit.

• POD supports and accommodates standards for data modeling as appropriate to the data governance requirements of particular projects.
  

• POD supports multi-modal deployment strategies, working equally for a single collaboration for a single instance, or to meet multiple needs for the same collaborative via its multipurpose data lake; or to meet manifold needs for multiple and fluid library consortia. It supports both a single instance model as well as federation of many instances–providing the benefit of distributed effort and governance with technical interoperability.
  

• POD emphasizes open design, open progress reports and open participation, because the best work is done in the open. Other institutions and collaborations may use POD outputs or add to them, even if they are not following an open paradigm.