The LongRec project focuses on persistent, reliable and trustworthy long-term archival of digital information, with emphasis on availability and use.

The four main research topics of LongRec are:

- Records transition survival: Maintain records and complete archives over decades, surviving changes in technology, formats, organisation, and environment.

- Preservation of semantic value: Maintain context, semantics and presentation information over decades, enabling proper understanding of the contents.

- Preservation of evidential value: Maintain security, history and other trust aspects over decades, allowing validation of the evidential value even for decades-old documents.

- Long-term usability: Enable search, retrieval and verification for decades-old documents across changes in terminology and technology.

The focus areas reflect that digital information is the original (a print-out is regarded as a copy). As such, solutions must be realised with today’s technology, and simultaneously be technology independent as technology evolves, especially over a time span of decades. Hence, technology is only one aspect; work processes and procedures are equally important, and must be addressed today in order to meet tomorrow’s challenges.

For further information, see http://www.longrec.com