Many organizations are now required to preserve and maintain access to large volumes of digital content for dozens of years. There is a need for preservation systems and processes to support such long-term retention requirements and enable the usability of those digital objects in the distant future, regardless of changes in technologies and designated communities. A key component in such preservation systems is the storage subsystem where the digital objects are located for most of their lifecycle. We describe SIRF (Self-contained Information Retention Format) -a logical storage container format specialized for long term retention. SIRF includes a set of digital preservation objects and a catalog with metadata related to the entire contents of the container as well as to the individual objects and their interrelationship. SIRF is being developed by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) 1 with the intention of creating a standardized vendor-neutral storage format that will be interpretable by future preservation systems and that will simplify and reduce the costs of digital preservation.

This article describes practical solutions to problems encountered over more than five years of operating a fully automated Web-based digital document submission, registration, and distribution system. The author began creating the system in 1997 to support the activities of a Technical Committee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standardization (INCITS). Since then, the system has received continual enhancement and expansion. The register now contains more than 8,000 documents submitted by Committee participants, stored as PDF files occupying more than 4 gigabytes of storage, which interested parties world-wide regularly access. A similar architecture and document registration system could be used to support any physically dispersed group cooperating on any type of project. The library is located on a public Web site and readers are encouraged to access it.