Shared Infrastructure Preservation Models

Participants

Project Description

We propose and evaluate a number of digital preservation models that rely on shared, existing infrastructure. The premise is that if archiving can be accomplished within a widely deployed infrastructure whose operational burden is shared among many partners, the resulting system will have only an incremental cost and be tolerant of dynamic participation. We will consider models that use:

network news transfer protocol (NNTP or "Usenet news")
simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP or "email")

Through shared infrastructure, the individual cost for participation is kept low and aggregate system functionality is not greatly impacted by participants joining and leaving. The models primarily focus on creatively utilizing existing Internet protocols and systems in order to decrease the deployment and maintenance burden for participating organizations. Our models will not "automatically" preserve data, but they should make it easy for those who wish to do so.

Publications

Michael L. Nelson, Joan A. Smith, Martin Klein, Repository Replication Using SMTP and NNTP, Proceedings of Digital Government 2006, pp. 436-437.
Joan A. Smith, Martin Klein, Michael L. Nelson, Repository Replication Using NNTP and SMTP, Proceedings of ECDL 2006, pp. 51-62. (Expanded version available as arXiv cs.DL/0606008).