Human culture depends on our ability to disseminate information, and then maintain and access it over time. This book addresses the problems of storing, reading, and using digital data for periods longer than 50 years. They offer concise descriptions of markup and document description languages like TIFF, PDF, HTML, and XML, explain important techniques such as migration and emulation, and present the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) Reference Model.

Uwe Borghoff is a full professor of computer science at the University of the Armed Forces (UniBwM), Munich, Germany. Prior to this, he worked at Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble, France, where he led the coordination technologies group.

Peter Rödig (UniBwM) is developing methods for long-term preservation of digital data. Related research interests include document engineering and database technologies.

Jan Scheffczyk (UniBwM) is researching issues such as consistency maintenance in document engineering, long-term preservation of digital data, and software engineering.

Lothar Schmitz is a lecturer at the UniBwM, and his research interests include software engineering and long-term preservation of digital data.