Conservation vs. Consensus in Peer-to-Peer Preservation Systems

摘要

The problem of digital preservation is widely acknowledged, but the underlying assumptions implicit to the design of systems that address this problem have not been analyzed explicitly. We identify two basic approaches to address the problem of digital preservation using peer-to-peer systems: conservation and consensus. We highlight the design tradeoffs involved in using the two general approaches, and we provide a framework for analyzing the characteristics of peer-to-peer preservation systems in general. In addition, we propose a novel conservation-based protocol for achieving preservation and we analyze its effectiveness with respect to our framework.