Long-Term Preservation of Digital Records: Trustworthy Digital Objects

The proper entities for archival attention are patterns inherent in transmitted and stored messages. Most digital archival repository technology—what private sector enterprises call content management (CM) technology—has been thoroughly understood and widely deployed for more than a decade. This technology is not adequate for long-term digital preservation because it includes no mechanisms for reliably assuring authenticity and intelligibility of digital documents for fifty years or longer. CM provides for near-term preservation without handling long-term preservation, which must overcome risks associated with technological obsolescence and fading human memory. This article offers a solution to mitigate these risks. Implementing the needed software would be a small addition to widely deployed CM offerings. This long-term preservation solution, devised for cultural and scholarly digital documents, is already structured to support archival principles for business records, and the article describes this Trustworthy Digital Object (TDO) architecture and its design core sufficiently to show how archivists can participate in managing digital repositories that conform and are attuned to the particular needs of any archival institution.