Over the past several decades, millions of digital objects of significant scientific, economic, cultural, and historic value have been published and distributed to libraries and archives on removable media. Providing long-term access to these documents, media files, and software executables is an increasingly complex task because of dependencies…

The preservation of digital data for the long term presents a variety of challenges from technical to social and organizational. The technical challenge is to ensure that the information, generated today, can survive long term changes in storage media, devices, and data formats. This paper presents a novel approach to the problem. It distinguishes…