Principles for Digital Preservation

Gladney, Dr. H.M. (2004) Principles for Digital Preservation.

Abstract

Published difficulties with long-term digital preservation prove to be largely confusions with language. Similar difficulties were addressed in early twentieth-century philosophy. We describe prominent confusions, show how to clarify the issues, and summarize a ‘Trustworthy Digital Object (TDO)’ method that solves all the technical challenges described in the literature. Other TDO reports provide detailed design and analysis of the TDO method.

A purpose of the current article is to invite searching public criticism before anyone invests significant resources in creating preservation data objects.