| This Service Genre describes systems that support the long-term preservation, management and managed disposal, if appropriate, of digital materials. The goal of such a system is to allow retrieval of the materials by members of a designated community of potential users. Long term preservation requires active decisions to be made about ways of ensuring that technological changes, such as new media and data formats and obsolescence of old ones, do not prevent retrieval in future. Long term planning to prevent degradation of the storage medium is also required. In order to achieve this long term preservation, the digital materials are typically supplemented by a variety of metadata, including explicit preservation metadata, to form an information object. Access to the system will typically be via Search or Harvest (described as Service Genres elsewhere in the e-Framework). |