Preservation of digital data with self-validating, self-instantiating knowledge-based archives

Abstract

Background and OverviewDigital archives have the mandate to capture and preserve information in such a way that the information can be (re-)discovered, accessed, and presented at any time in the future. An obvious challenge for archives of digital information is the limited storage lifetimes due to physical media decay.This research has been sponsored by a NARA supplement to the National Science Foundation project ASC 96-19020. However, since hardware and software technologies evolve rapidly and much faster than the media decay, the real challenge lies in the technological obsolescence of the infrastructure that is used to access and present the archived information. Among other findings, the Task Force on Archiving Digital Information concluded that an infrastructure is needed that supports distributed systems of digital archives, and identified data migration as a crucial means for the sustained access to digital information [5].In a collaboration with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) developed an information management architecture and prototype for digital archives, based on scalable archival storage systems (HPSS), data handling middleware (SRB/MCAT), and XML-based mediation techniques (MIX) [9, 12, 1].1 To achieve the goal of reinstantiating archived information on a future platform, it is not sufficient to merely copy data at the bit level from obsolete to current media but to create "recoverable" archival representations that are infrastructure independent (or generic) to the largest extent possible. Indeed the challenge is the forward-migration in time of information and knowledge about the archived data, i.e., of the various kinds of metainformation that will allow recreation and interpretation of structure and content of archived data.In this paper, we describe an architecture for infrastructure independent, knowledge-based archival and collection management. Our approach is knowledge-based in the sense that the ingestion process can employ both structural and semantic models of the collection, including a "flattened" relational representation, a "reassembled" semistructured representation, and higherlevel "semantic" representation. The architecture is modular since the ingestion process consists of transformations that are put together and executed 1

Designing a Digital Archive for Indigenous People

“…Despite this, however, still only a fraction of archival sources has been digitized, and in some countries, such as Sweden and Finland, this is estimated to be only 5 percent. Digital archives are known as platforms that preserve information in a way that can be (re-)discovered, accessed and presented at any time in the future [6]. There are many studies investigating how to develop digital archive platforms for longer and better preservation of the archive materials and their increased use [6] [7].…”

“…Digital archives are known as platforms that preserve information in a way that can be (re-)discovered, accessed and presented at any time in the future [6]. There are many studies investigating how to develop digital archive platforms for longer and better preservation of the archive materials and their increased use [6] [7]. However, many researchers believe that merely developing a digital platform for preserving archival sources is not enough, and a visual interface for digital archives is necessary to increase the accessibility of such platforms [8].…”

The Long-Term Preservation of Web Content

“…This 'preservation metadata' is understood to be all of the various types of data that allows the re-creation and interpretation of the structure and content of digital data over time (Ludäscher, Marciano & Moore, 2001). Understood in this way, it is clear that such metadata needs to support an extremely wide range of different functions, including discovery and access, recording the contexts and provenance of objects, to the documentation of repository actions and policies.…”