IJDL focussed issue on persistent archives

Digital preservation is a major concern in the digital age. The classical challenges we face in this area are multifaceted and range from data medium conversion to software emulation for documents and multimedia objects. As we generate massive amounts of highly complex data, new challenges arise to keep resources usable, meaningful, and understandable over long time periods. The four papers collected in this issue look at different aspects of persistent archives, i.e., classification of collections, different distributed architectures for archival, as well as the state-of-the-art in the domain of engineering which has been and is still driving a lot of the requirements for persistent archives. In the paper “Using wavelet analysis for text categorization in digital libraries: a first experiment with Strathprints” by Daranyi/etal the focus is on handling large amounts of documents and to categorize them automatically for later access. It combines different research areas to form an innovative approach. In “Extending OAI-PMH over structured P2P networks for digital preservation” Everton/etal explore the possibility to distribute the responsibility of keeping copies and therefore prevent loss of information to a network of OAI-enabled libraries. They also take the reliability into account and calculate the best distribution. To investigate complex objects Brunsmann explores in “State-of-the-art of long-term preservation in product life