Collection-based persistent archives

The supercomputer center, digital library, and archival storage communities have common persistent archival storage requirements. Each of these communities is building software infrastructure to organize and store large collections of data. An emerging common requirement is the ability to maintain data collections for long periods of time. The challenge is to maintain the ability to discover, access, and display digital objects that are stored within the archive, while the technology used to manage the archive evolves. We propose an approach based upon the storage of the digital objects that comprise the collection, augmented with the meta-data attributes needed to dynamically re-create the data collection. This approach builds upon the technology needed to support extensible database schema, which in turn enables the creation of data-handling systems that support replicated data sets within federated archives