There is no doubt that the amount of information produced by our society, both in traditional and digital formats, has exploded in recent years, and there is no indication that this growing trend is going to reverse. This book is not about the information overload, but about the different reasons for and strategies of dealing with the worthy results produced by this phenomenon. Gladney makes an assumption that not all of the currently available digital information is worthy of preserving. The book provides a wide range of examples that illustrate the various types of information. It is for producers and users who may be interested in long-term archiving and retrieval of digital information.

This book states that today there is no single solution that will work for the many kinds of digital information being used by many different users. However, today, we already have systems with varying architectures and quality that are suited for storage and retrieval of very different types of digital information: scientific data and research publications, government records, monographs, articles, music, video, images, and personal information.

Gladney attempts to demystify the idea of preserving digital information. Although the author claims that this book is accessible to a wide range of readers (including artists, attorneys, medical professionals, entertainment industry managers, and regular citizens), it is best suited for more technically inclined readers, ideally those with a software engineering background. The author views his subject from an engineering perspective because this is probably the only approach that would enable him to propose a technically sound solution to this problem.

Section 1, “Why We Need Long-Term Digital Preservation,” makes the case for the book. This section is the most accessible, and probably the most useful, for any nontechnical reader interested in the subject. Here, the author discusses what information is worth preserving and what knowledge this information can communicate. The answers lie in the careful analysis of the needs of different users of information.

The section “Information Object Structure” provides the underlying philosophical foundation that is necessary for understanding those aspects of communication that are involved in making decisions about which information objects to preserve. This section outlines the structuring schemes of digital documents and their collections on the basis of a communication model and an information representation model.

The brief section “Distributed Content Management” emphasizes a wide range of existing technical standards and solutions in the areas of data and file formats, data and information storage and identification, and data archiving. This section also contains an interesting survey of existing and widely used content management systems.

The fourth section of the book, “Digital Object Architecture for the Long Term,” focuses on three aspects of handling trustworthy digital objects: replication to protect from loss, digital signing to prove authenticity, and durable encoding of data to make it readable and compatible with future retrieval systems.

The book concludes with a section aptly titled “Peroration,” which outlines some unanswered questions and further work in the area of preserving digital information.

Clearly, Gladney is an expert on this subject, and this book offers a thorough treatment of it. However, with the exception of the first section and contrary to the author’s suggestion, this book may not be very accessible to readers without some technical background.