Implementing a reliable digital object archive?

Abstract

An Archival Repository reliably stores digital objects for long periods of time (decades or centuries). The archival nature of the sys-tem requires new techniques for storing, indexing, and replicating digital objects. In this paper we discuss the specialized indexing needs of a write-once archive. We also present a reliability algorithm for effectively replicating sets of related objects. We describe a data import utility for archival repositories. Finally, we discuss and evaluate a prototype repository we have built, the Stanford Archival Vault (SAV).