NARA Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype

NARA Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype

PI: Reagan W. Moore, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Traditional preservation environments support fundamental preservation activities such as appraisal, accession, arrangement, description, preservation, and access. Digital preservation environments also support information about individual records, management of data encoding formats, migration to new forms of technology, management of massive archives, and validation of trustworthiness assessment criteria. We propose the development of a reference implementation for digital preservation environments based on data grid technology. A reference implementation defines the assessment criteria, the management policies, and the preservation procedures needed for long-term preservation.

The reference implementation will demonstrate the basic mechanisms needed to support long-term preservation of digital records. Based on ten years of experience with applying distributed data management systems to preservation projects, the components of a reference implementation are well understood. The components include mechanisms to automate the management of the preservation environment, automate the validation of assessment criteria for trustworthiness, authenticity, integrity, and chain of custody, and support the incorporation of new technology through extensible policies, extensible procedures, and extensible sets of system information. The goal is to minimize the labor required to manage the massive US record collections (measured in petabytes of data and billions of files), while preserving the essential properties of the records.

The system will be used to inform the National Archives and Records Administration on the approaches that result in viable preservation environments, and to demonstrate to the archival community an approach that successfully manages technology evolution.