Autonomic preservation of "Access Copies" of digital contents

The paper proposes the abstract approach enabling the delegation of the preservation processes that can be applied automatically to the access copies. The current standard, OAIS, is a reference model only and doesnot prescribe or even guide implementation. In particular, OAIS is designed around the Archival Information Package, leaving the Dissemination Information Package outside its boundaries. At the same time the "access copies" created as Dissemination Packages, must be preserved as well and very often can be considered as the cultural heritage the user is able to access. Small institutions as well as private users, usually cannot afford a dedicated Archival Information System for preservation and their access copies often constitute the contents themselves. This paper investigates and analyses the problem of autonomic management of the "access copies" preservation. Autonomous agents have been conceptualized in order to manage the stored contents and to keep them updated. The representation of dependencies and obsolescence has been analysed for allowing the automatic application of migration paths.