Novel Tools for Digital Archiving and Preservation

Since the mid-nineties, the problem of long-term archiving and preservation of digital information has received considerable attention by major archiving communities, library organizations, government agencies, scientific and private organizations. These studies have identified major challenges regarding technology infrastructure, institutional and business models, and social and legal frameworks, which need to be addressed to achieve long-term reliable access to digital information. In this talk, we will give a brief overview of our approach, called ADAPT (Approach to Digital Archiving and Preservation Technology), to build a platform-independent infrastructure based on a set of reconfigurable tools that use open standards and Web technologies. Our approach can easily accommodate emerging standards and policies, and will evolve gracefully as the underlying technologies change. These tools have been coordinated with our collaborators at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.