Modeling Archival Repositories for Digital Libraries

This paper studies the archival problem: how a digital library can preserve electronic documents over long periods of time. We analyze how an archival repository can fail and we present different strategies that help solve the problem. We introduce ArchSim, a simulation tool that for evaluating an implementation of an archival repository system and compare options such as different disk reliabilities, error detection and correction algorithms, preventive maintenance, etc. We use ArchSim to analyze a case study of an Archival Repository for Computer Science Technical Reports. KEYWORDS: digital archiving, digital preservation, archival repository, models for archival repositories, performance of archival repositories, simulation of archival repositories. 1 Introduction A continual threat to digital libraries is the loss of documents. Digital information can be lost not just through magnetic decay in storage devices, but also because of format and device obsolescence. This problem wil..