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Preserving Digital Information

Henry M. Gladney

Springer Verlag, 2007

Cultural history enthusiasts have asserted urgent need to protect digitalinformation from imminent loss. Without steps not generally undertaken, much ofwhat has been created in digital form is likely to become unusable in a few decades.Although a decade had elapsed since this challenge was articulated, no completeprocedure for accomplishing this emerged before that described in this book.

Preserving Digital Information teaches a complete technical solution and justifiesits correctness and optimality. It focuses on principles for long-term digitalpreservation partly because, at the time it was written, it was not yet possible topoint at implementations of all the software that would be needed.

The method described will work for any kind of digital document, multimedia file,business record collection, or scientific information, and is believed to be optimalwith respect to both the quality of the preserved information and end-userconvenience. Additionally, the book explains the requirements of the relatedsoftware, and sketches how that can be implemented.

In 2014, the book still presents an up-to-date description of its field, together with asolution for all managerial and technical problems identified in the pertinentprofessional literature. It is for

Archivists, research librarians, and museum curators who need tounderstand digital technology in order to manage their institutions;

Software engineers and computer scientists whose work requires soundinformation about digital preservation; and

Attorneys, medical professionals, government bureaucrats, and businessmenwho depend on the long-term reliability of digital records.

Henry M. Gladney, Ph.D., is an industry consultant for digital documentmanagement. In 2001, he began work on digital preservation, after having workedfor IBM Research for decades, designing—among other systems—a digital libraryservice that is the core of today's IBM Content Manager®. He published over 70articles in professional periodicals, holds eleven patents, and produced the DigitalDocument Quarterly”, an online newsletter that discussed preservation extensively.

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Describes a concise methodology for long-term preservationof all kinds of digital documents.

Justifies this methodology using 20th-centurytheory of knowledge communication.

Outlines the requirements and architecture for the software needed.

Combines end-user view with technical implementation knowledge.

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