Principles for Digital Preservation

Abstract

The immense investments in creating and disseminating digitally represented information have not been accompanied by commensurate effort to ensure the longevity of information of permanent interest. Asserted difficulties with long-term digital preservation prove to be largely underestimation of what technology can provide. We show how to clarify prominent misunderstandings and sketch a 'Trustworthy Digital Object (TDO)' method that solves all the published technical challenges.