Using a Grid for Digital Preservation

Digital preservation aims at maintaining digital objects and data accessible over long periods of time. Data grids provide several functionalities required by digital preservation systems, especially when massive amounts of data must be preserved, as in e-Science domains. We propose the use of existing data grid solutions to build frameworks for digital preservation. In this paper we survey the main threats to digital preservation, which are used to identify a central point of failure in the metadata catalog of the iRODS data grid solution. We propose three extensions to the iRODS framework, to overcome the shortcomings of iRODS when used as a digital preservation system.