Portico: A Case Study in the Use of XML for the Long-Term Preservation of Digital Artifacts

In the problem space of long-term preservation of digital objects, the disciplined use of XML affords a reasonable solution to many of the issues associated with ensuring the interpretability and renderability of at least some digital artifacts. This paper describes the experience of Portico, a digital preservation service that preserves scholarly literature in electronic form. It describes some of the challenges and practices entailed in processing and producing XML for the archive, including issues of syntax, semantics, linking, versioning, and prospective issues of scale, variety of formats, and the larger infrastructure of tools and practices required for the use of XML for the long haul.