Archives-Taking the Long View: Preservation May Not Absolutely Mean the Completed Continuum of the Content's History, but Rather, It Serves as a Compendium of the 'Official' Content Pieces. or Does It?

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The underlying driver of all digital preservation is what our activities will look like in 25, 50, or 100 years. This perspective has to be incorporated into long-range business planning, the technology road map, and community governance.

For the past 2 years, I have been immersed in the world of digital preservation by being at the helm of the CLOCKSS Archive. Digital preservation, from our perspective, will be based on an approach that provides for decentralized and distributed preservation (lots of copies keeps stuff safe), preserving the publisher's original authoritative version, and perpetual access to approved released ("triggered") content. These networks must be affordable and sustainable. CLOCKSS will, in its standard harvest process, preserve nearly all web-published content, including supplementary materials, branding, presentation, and all file formats.

Impact of Time on Community Governance

CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is a not for-profit joint venture between the world's leading scholarly publishers and research libraries. Their mission is to build a sustainable, geographically distributed dark archive with which to ensure the long-term survival of web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research community.

Community governance of the CLOCKSS Archive over the next decades will most likely look much the same as it is does today. Governance is, historically, a slowly evolving mechanism. This steadiness provides a constant that is needed to focus and maintain momentum on the goals of digital preservation. The basic principle of an equal balance of publishers and libraries on the board is our fundamental foundation, which provides for the involvement by the key industry perspectives. Their input, discussions, …