Archival initiatives in the engineering context

Over the last decades, the amount of digital technical documents related to industrial products has increased exponentially. In spite of the application of traditional document engineering methods, the long term preservation issues is becoming crucial in the engineering context. Long-term preservation of digital technical materials requires a strong characterization of the structural and semantic properties, or data format, of these materials for purposes of validation, monitoring for obsolescence, transformation, etc. In this paper, we present some of the undergoing works linked to the archive management in the engineering context and we relate on an initial experiment that have been made to preserve the information related to the product lifecycle context.