Motivations and Challenges for Digital Preservation in Design and Engineering

Digital preservation is a fairly new consideration in design and engineering companies. The core motivations for enterprises to engage in digital preservation endeavors are of economic and legal nature. This paper provides an overview of software components and processes in typical engineering scenarios, based on electrical engineering as an example. In addition, it describes typical product data in an engineering process which is subject to potential archiving. Based upon the engineering scenario and motivations, the challenges for digital preservation are derived and examined. These challenges cover a wide range of software engineering and scientific challenges.