Unsupervised creation of small world networks for the preservation of digital objects
Charles L. Cartledge, Michael L. Nelson · 2009
The prevailing model for digital preservation is that archives should be similar to a “fortress”: a large, protective infras-tructure built to defend a relatively small collection of data from attack by external forces. Such projects are a luxury, suitable only for limited collections of known importance and requiring significant institutional commitment for sus-tainability. In previous research, we have shown the web infrastructure (i.e., search engine caches, web archives) re-freshes and migrates web content in bulk as side-effects of their user-services, and these results can be mined as a use-ful, but passive preservation service. Our current research involves a number of questions resulting from removing the implicit assumption that web-based data objects must pas-sively await curatorial services: What if data objects were not tethered to repositories? What are the implications if the content were actively seeking out and injecting itself into the web infrastructure (i.e., search engine caches, web archives)? All of this leads to our primary research ques-tion: Can we create objects that preserve themselves more effectively than repositories or web infrastructure can?