Abstract. Custodians of digital content take action when the material that they are responsible for is threatened by, for example, obsolescence or deterioration. At first glance, ideal preservation actions retain every aspect of the original objects with the highest level of fidelity. Achieving this goal can, however, be costly, infeasible, and sometimes even undesirable. As a result, custodians must focus their attention on preserving the most significant characteristics of the content, even at the cost of sacrificing less important ones. The concept of significant characteristics has become prominent within the digital preservation community to capture this key goal. As is often the case in an emerging field, however, the term has become over-loaded and remains ill-defined. In this paper, we unpack the meaning that lies behind the phrase, analyze the domain, and introduce clear terminology.

The persistent identifier (PID) landscape extends to cover objects, individuals and organisations engaged in the process of research. Established services such as DataCite, Crossref, ORCID and ISNI are providing a foundation for a trusted ecosystem and a new generation of services. Scalable identifier systems will support researchers and capture research activity in a holistic way, across the entire lifecycle. Challenges remain -siloed services are not interoperable; important types of objects are not adequately covered, many processes remain manual, and adoption, while strong, is not consistent across disciplines.This article draws on the work of the EU-funded THOR project to take stock of the current state of interoperability across the PID landscape and to discuss the next steps towards an integrated research record. Examples illustrate how this interconnectivity is facilitated technically, as well as social and human challenges in fostering adoption. User stories highlight how this network of persistent identifier services is facilitating good practice in open research and where its limitations lie.

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As institutions turn towards developing archival digital repositories, many decisions on the use of metadata have to be made. In addition to deciding on the more traditional descriptive and administrative metadata, particular care needs to be given to the choice of structural and preservation metadata, as well as to integrating the various metadata components. This paper reports on the use of METS structural, PREMIS preservation and MODS descriptive metadata for the British Library's eJournal system.

This paper is an extended and updated version of the work reported at iPres 2008. Digital preservation activities can only succeed if they go beyond the technical properties of digital objects. They must consider the strategy, policy, goals, and constraints of the institution that undertakes them and take into account the cultural and institutional framework in which data, documents and records are preserved. Furthermore, because organizations differ in many ways, a one-size-fits-all approach cannot be appropriate. Fortunately, organizations involved in digital preservation have created documents describing their policies, strategies, work-flows, plans, and goals to provide guidance. They also have skilled staff who are aware of sometimes unwritten considerations. Within Planets (Farquhar & Hockx-Yu, 2007), a four-year project co-funded by the European Union to address core digital preservation challenges, we have analyzed preservation guiding documents and interviewed staff from libraries, archives, and data centres that are actively engaged in digital preservation. This paper introduces a conceptual model for expressing the core concepts and requirements that appear in preservation guiding documents. It defines a specific vocabulary that institutions can reuse for expressing their own policies and strategies. In addition to providing a conceptual framework, the model and vocabulary support automated preservation planning tools through an XML representation.