I could walk into the British Library in London tomorrow and (assuming that my Latin was up to the task) read the Magna Carta, written in 1215, that is stored there. Today, however, important documents tend to be stored only in digital format and the trauma of a recent attempt by a friend to recover an important WordStar document stored on a floppy disk in the mid-1980s has highlighted to me just how nontrivial it is to store important digital information for long-term future use.

This book is from the Springer “Studies in Computational Intelligence” series and is an edited collection of nine essays on digital archiving and preservation. The essays are divided into two parts. The two essays of the first part look at the issues and basic problems affecting long-term preservation of digital material and associated metadata, whereas the seven essays of the second part discuss aspects of a project that is attempting to address these issues, the Polish CREDO (Cyfrowe Repozytorium Dokumentów) Digital Document Repository project, which is supported by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund.

The first essay of Part 1 introduces the issues and examines the problems and costs associated with storing digital information for long-term archival purposes. Included is an illuminating reference [1] to Vint Cerf’s comments at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose in February 2016 that the 21st century could appear to future generations to have been a digital Dark Age because digital material from that era will have been irrecoverably lost. The second essay considers preservation of associated metadata that is needed to make sense of digital data. Metadata is detail describing the digital material being preserved, information such as creation date, digital rights, and color encoding for images. In many cases, preservation of data is pointless without also preserving its associated metadata.

Part 2 begins with an essay outlining the CREDO project and examines the project goals against the requirements for long-term digital preservation. Various aspects of digital storage technologies are discussed, including reliability, integrity, and operating costs. The fourth essay discusses the CREDO system architecture and how its loosely coupled subsystems and federated archives achieve long-lasting and sustainable storage solutions. Technical standards, file system technologies, aspects of technology life cycle evolution, and management subsystems for digital archives are covered. The next essay, the fifth in the book, looks at the CREDO information processing model. The logical structure of the CREDO archive and the processes (referred to as sessions) for various archive actions, such as administration, searching, and moving material into and out of the archive, are discussed.

The processing and preservation of metadata associated with the stored digital material in the CREDO archive is covered in the sixth essay. The sources, processing, searching, and preservation techniques for various categories of metadata are discussed. The next essay deals with the long-term persistence management of archival data storage systems (magnetic tapes, hard disk drives, optical disks, semiconductor memory, and so on) that form the data carriers for archived data. Aspects such as reliability, failure prediction and analysis, power management, data relocation and replication, and systems monitoring are examined. The eighth essay considers management of hardware and data in the CREDO archive. A scheduling algorithm for optimized management of archive operations to achieve a balance between the competing issues of cost and storage reliability is presented and discussed. The ninth and final essay discusses the use of a combination of multiple file formats, storage technologies, operating systems, and so on, as well as geographically dispersed federated archives to protect against the effects of natural disasters, wars, and technological change and to ensure reliable long-term preservation of digital data.

The essays are presented in a consistent format, each with an abstract, introduction, conclusion, and detailed references. A minor point is the lack of chapter/essay numbering, which makes navigation and reference a little difficult. However, the topic is interesting and of growing importance as more and more of our government, corporate, and personal documents exist solely in digital format. The book is easy to read, although some unusual grammar clearly indicates the first language of the authors is not English. The editors have presented an excellent collection of papers on an important issue that deserves greater attention. In particular, the first essay by Traczyk is a concise summary of the issues and deserves wider coverage, being short enough to fit within the attention span of most politicians.