Digital Preservation: New Challenges for Software Maintenance

Digital preservation ensures continued access to digital information over time (e.g., 5, 15, 25 or 50 years). The long-term planning horizon of preserving relevant parts of a business processes raises a number of new research challenges for software design, development and maintenance (cf. [1]). In this paper we describe the challenges caused by the preservation of software and give a short overview of the TIMBUS research project that aims to address these challenges.