nestor - Network of Expertise in Long-term Storage of Digital Resources in Germany - is a no-profit organisation led by the German National Library - Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Nestor has four strategic pillars: lobbying, content development, qualification and offering services. It issues the nestor Seal for Trustworthy Digital Archives, which assesses compliance with the German standard DIN 31644 "Kriterien für vertrauenswürdige digitale Langzeitarchive" (Criteria for trustworthy long-term digital archives). It publishes free-access guidelines and technical specifications.

Nestor has nine working groups on topics like “personal digital archiving” and “community survey”. The nestor working group on archival standards (https://www.langzeitarchivierung.de/Webs/nestor/DE/Arbeitsgruppen/AG_Archivstandard/ag_archivstandard_node.html, hereafter: WG) was founded in 2019. It allows archivists to create and maintain standards for the archival community, and it is led by the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg.

Since the University of Hamburg Archives joined the WG in 2022, the „nestor-Archivstandard Archivierung von Studierendendaten aus Fachverfahren" (nestor Archival Standard for Archiving Students’ Data from E-Government Applications) was issued in 2023 and two more standards have been drafted: “Standardisierte Aussonderung aus DMS” (Standardised Disposition from Records-management Systems) and "Prozesse und Kriterien zur Bewertung von Forschungsdaten" (Processes and Criteria for Appraising Research Data). Both standards are to be published in 2026.

The WG has a special position: from one side, for it is the only nestor WG representing archives’ and archivists’ needs and wants, it aims to represent the archival community in Germany’s leading organisation for digital preservation and long-term archiving. From the other side, it makes communication between nestor (and its members) and archival institutions more direct and effective.

Because suggestions for new standards may be proposed bottom-up by any archivist or archival institutions and since the WG is representative of the German archival landscape (in terms of typologies, dimensions and geographical position), the WG is in the author’s view a good example of governance frameworks for community participation and participatory co-creation.