A Standards-based Solution for the Accurate Transfer of Digital Assets

This article describes results of a collaboration between the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the American Physical Society (APS) aimed at designing and implementing a robust solution for the recurrent transfer of digital assets from the APS collection to LANL. In this solution, various recent standards are combined to obtain an asset transfer framework that should be attractive as a means to optimize content transfer in environments beyond the specific APS/LANL project. The proposed solution uses an XML-based complex object format (the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language) for the application-neutral representation of compound digital assets of all sorts. It uses a pull-oriented HTTP-based protocol (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) that allows incrementally collecting new and updated assets, represented as XML documents, from a producing archive. It builds on an XML-specific technique (W3C XML Signatures) to provide guarantees regarding authenticity and accuracy of the transferred assets.