Digital preservation and workflow process

Abstract

The digital societies of E-government, E-learning, and E-business have grown by leaps and bounds worldwide during the last several years. While we have invested significant time and effort to create and maintain those workflow processes, we do not have the ability to make digital objects generated by the processes all available across generations of information technology, making it accessible with future technology and enabling people to determine whether it is authentic and reliable. This is a very serious problem for which no complete solutions have been devised yet. This paper discusses three important factors - archival stability, organizational process, and technology continuity - for digital preservation to succeed, and describes a general framework of digital libraries (or the life cycle of information) to address this important problem so that we may find reasonable ways to preserve digital objects that can be analyzed and evaluated in quantitative measures and incremental manners. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.