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We describe the aims and aspirations for the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), the UK response to the realisation that digital information is both essential and fragile. We recognise the equivalence of preservation as "interoperability with the future", asserting that digital curation is concerned with 'communication across time'. We see the DCC as having relevance for present day data curation and for continuing data access for generations to come. We describe the structure and plans of the DCC, designed to support these aspirations and based on a view of world class research being developed into curation services, all of which are underpinned by outreach to the broadest community.

The CIA World Factbook is a prime example of a curated database – a database that is constructed and maintained with a great deal of human effort in collecting, verifying, and annotating data. Preservation of old versions of the Factbook is important for verification of citations; it is also essential for anyone interested in the history of the data such as demographic change. Although the Factbook has been published, both physically and electronically, only for the past 30 years, we appear in danger of losing this history. This paper investigates the issues involved in capturing the history of an evolving database and its application to the CIA World Factbook. In particular it shows that there is substantial added value to be gained by preserving databases in such a way that questions about the change in data, (longitudinal queries) can be readily answered. Within this paper, we describe techniques for recording change in a curated database and we describe novel techniques for querying the change. Using the example of this archived curated database, we discuss the extent to which the accepted practices and terminology of archiving, curation and digital preservation apply to this important class of digital artefacts.

The Distributed National Electronic Resource is a central plank of the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee's strategy. We outline the background and definitions of the DNER and discuss some of the issues to be investigated and the collaboration required between stakeholders and their partners.

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