Implementing a Reliable Digital Object Archive

An Archival Repository reliably stores digital objects for long periods of time (decades or centuries). The archival nature of the system requires new techniques for storing, indexing, and replicating digital objects. In this paper we discuss the specialized indexing needs of a write-once archive. We also present a reliability algorithm for effectively replicating sets of related objects. We describe a data import utility for archival repositories. Finally, we discuss and evaluate a prototype repository we have built, the Stanford Archival Vault (SAV).