Design Strategies for a Prototype Electronic Preservation System for Biomedical Documents

TL;DRAbstract

Among the digital material considered for preservation at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) are TIFF, PDF and HTML files of biomedical journals, laboratory notebooks, correspondence of major figures in biomedical research, and similar documents. Although most of these materials are already in digital form (either as born-digital information, or converted to digital form through scanning), preservation of these materials involve complex administrative and technical issues, such as obtaining and storing adequate levels of metadata for a preserved resource, assuring intellectual integrity of the contents, and avoiding technical obsolescence of encoded information. An R&D project has been initiated at NLM to develop a prototype system that would help investigate the key technical functions required to effectively preserve NLM's digital resources over the long term. This system, named the System for Preservation of Electronic Resources (SPER) has had its initial design and implemen

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