Overview of Technological Approaches to Digital Preservation and Challenges in Coming Years 1

The preservation of digital objects involves a variety of challenges, including policy questions, institutional roles and relationships, legal issues, intellectual property rights, and metadata. But behind or perhaps beneath such issues, there are substantial challenges at the empirical level. What does it mean to preserve digital objects? What purposes are served by preserving them? What are the real possibilities for successful preservation? What are the problems encountered in trying to exploit these possibilities? Can we articulate a framework or an overall architecture for digital preservation that allows us to discriminate and select possibilities?