Method and System for Preparing Digital Information for Long-Term Preservation

摘要

A system and method are provided for creating or extending a preservation-ready digital document. This document is represented so as to be durably intelligible and reliably trustworthy. It includes within itself standardized metadata, provenance information, and reliable links to chosen documents within a world-wide network of digital repositories. These links and the documents' own identifier(s) are chosen to uniquely, unambiguously, and forever identify what they refer to. This system provides a robustly durable method of preserving an unbounded number of digital objects for as long as their representing bit-strings are kept in existence and findable by now-conventional digital library technology, as first described in [Gladney 2000] and publications by the same author. The overall system herein described provides this service without requiring that pre-existing software be modified, and without requiring that any information object that it is intended to protect be modified from what its declared authors, editors, and producers created and provided as input for this preservation packaging service.