Information Management in Federated Digital Archives

Abstract

The chapter describes the problem of resources dislocation among federated archives. In the archive lifetime, the resource can be a subject of format change, relocation, transfer onto another operating system or area, the data carrier can be a subject of magnetic renewal, etc. Some of the operations can be risky, namely the resource can be, in the effect of them, damaged. The federation of archives allows for dislocation of digital resources, i.e. the another method to ensure reliable ability to read it. As the federated archives are usually geographically dispersed, have different operating systems, or storage media, are managed in various ways, the dislocation prevents against the effects of natural disasters, acts of war, etc. The chapter describes acquisition and placement of information about the corresponding resources, archives identification, and communication among the archives. The developed coordination protocol, basing on the state of the art, is described and presented under the assumption, that the archives communicate as they have software agents to communicate with each other. It allows among others, that the archives do not need to be homogeneous. Finally, the implementation proposal of the module responsible for relocation is described.