Building preservation environments

The preservation of digital entities requires data management technologies that are provided by digital libraries and data grids. Digital libraries provide standard data organization and presentation mechanisms. Data grids provide support for infrastructure independence, the ability to incorporate new technology as it becomes available. Preservation environments integrate these technologies to assure the authenticity and integrity of digital entities. We describe the concepts behind preservation and illustrate the concepts with three data preservation environments based on the NARA research prototype persistent archive, the NHPRC Persistent Archive Testbed, and the NSF NSDL persistent archive