The primary objective of this joint-Industry project is the Persistent, Reliable and Trustworthy Long-Term Archival of Digital Documents, with Emphasis on Availability and Use of Documents. The particular problems addressed by the LongRec project typically emerge when document lifetime exceeds 20 years.

This 3-year project is supported by the Norwegian Research Council.

The overall research challenge for LongRec is to establish theory, mechanisms, and technology that enable companies to trust long-term (several decades) storage of digital original documents, and to be able to use and update the documents throughout their lifetime. LongRec addresses records management. A (archive) record is created when one or more documents and supporting information (context information, semantic information, and presentation information) are assembled and stored.

LongRec addresses the case where such records must have an active lifetime (in the sense of being updated and used) of several decades. An archive record is created and used in work processes related to document management. LongRec addresses such processes through the case studies, ensuring that the records management solutions developed are capable of supporting document management. To achieve persistent, reliable, and trustworthy storage and use of digital original documents over decades, the problem area has to be covered in full breadth and sufficient depth. Any single remaining issue may be enough to halt the transition to digital documents! Thus, a broad scope is necessary, with research focussing on the areas where state of the art is not sufficiently developed at present. In other areas, state of the art will be applied and improved, and best practice recommendations will be developed. Based on the analysis done during the writing of the LongRec proposal, the following main research challenges are identified: