![]() ![]() Based on these fundamental ideas about digital preservation, a number of components, tools and techniques are being created in order to provide a broadly applicable infrastructure to allow the spreading of the burden of preserving the understandability and usability of digitally encoded information. In summary: CASPAR is attempting to use OAIS concepts rigorously and to the fullest extent possible, supplementing these where appropriate. This paper describes the tools, techniques and infrastructure components which the CASPAR project is producing to help in sharing the preservation burden. Clearly the bits must be passed on (but may be transformed along the way), however something more is required - because of the need to maintain understandability, not just access. ![]() We argue that if no single organization, project or person can guarantee funding or effort (or even interest), then somehow we must share the 'preservation load', and this is more than a simple chain of preservation consisting of handing on the collection of bits from one holder to the next. What can be done? Can anything be guaranteed? Probably not guaranteed - but at least one can try to reduce the risk of losing the information. However it seems reasonable to say that no organization, project or person can ever say for certain that their ability to provide this effort is going to last forever. Since we cannot predict these changes this cannot be just a one-off action continued effort is required. Preserving the ability to understand and process digitally encoded information over long periods more ยป of time is especially hard when so many things will change, including hardware, software, environment and the tacit and implicit knowledge that people have. ![]() Furthermore the volume of information involved will require us to allow automated processing of such information. Moreover one must be able to understand the relationship between the many individual pieces of information. Information about Nuclear Waste will include both documents as well as data. Preserving digitally encoded information which is not just to be rendered, as a document, but which must processed, like data, is even harder than one might think, because understandability of the information which is encoded in the digital object(s) is what is required. ![]()
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