Future Digital: Storing Content Forever

The GPO is faced with the challenging task of perserving millions of documents for historical purposes for future generations.

Long term document preservation.  That’s one of the tasks faced by the US Government Printing Office (GPO).  Most company documents managed under compliance regulations will usually have disposition schedules with recommendations for determining when documents are obsolete and can be disposed.  But the government has a much more difficult task for preserving millions and millions of documents for long-term historical purposes. 

To meet this goal, the GPO has taken on a project called the Future Digital System (FDsys).  This ‘Digital Content System’  project kicked off in July 2004 and is expecting to complete in October 2007.  The status of the project is updated periodically on the FDsys blog.

FDsys is tasked with being able to electronically preserve, authenticate, manage and deliver documents on demand.  Printing and electronic delivery services need to be available to all branches of the federal government, 1250 Federal Depository Libraries, and to the general public.

The GPO challenge is to be able to preserve today’s documents for the lifetime of the government.   In the world of paper, the process of preserving books for decades or hundreds of years is well understood.  But archiving electronic documents is much more complex than the archival of paper documents. 

Documents originating in formats like MS Office, PDF, XML, JPEG, or TIFF will need to be stored in ways to ensure readability years from now.  The range of existing file formats is huge and the pace that formats change, are introduced, and are obsoleted create the challenge.   

A goal for the FDsys design was to use best of breed components that are based on open standards.  THE GPO created an architecture that is based on the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model.  OAIS was designed as a domain neutral archtecture for preserving digital information for long periods of time.  It is frequently cited in the building of digital archive and digital library systems.  But it is often criticized as a standard that is not detailed enough in specifics.

OAIS defines basic components called “Information Packets” and describes how to manage and access the content and what is needed to understand it.  One part of OAIS is called the Submission Information Package (SIP) that describes a method for generating packages of data for submission to the archival system. 

FDsys, if successful, is a system that could well serve as a model for other long-term digital libraries.  It will be interesting to track their progress and see how well the system works when it is made available next year.