...
It is now clear that much of the basis of our intellectual, organizational, scientific and cultural heritage is increasingly in digital form and can only be fully utilized in digital form. Our mission is to facilitate organizations and institutions whose own missions depend on technologies and techniques to create, manage, publish, share and preserve the world's information. Unless these organizations and institutions can sustain the world's information, provide durable access and the means to interconnect related information, regardless of the immediate economic value of the information, much of our heritage is at risk and our ability to perform important scientific and humanities research maybe greatly reduced.
We will do our best to:
- enable the building of information systems to provide access to durable, enduring and re-usable digital content.
- We will do our best to straddle both the Web and enterprise system needs while minimizing complexity to enable widest possible use.
- We will do our best to enable content owners to establish and enforce policies for trust and access to their content, and we will never require that they yield any rights to their content or pay any fee to anyone in order to use the software and practices we provide.
- We will do our best to enable the use of best practices for the handling and curation of the content contained within information systems incorporating our software.
- We will do our best to provide key technologies in free open source for all our goals.
- We will do our best to ensure that the software we support is modular and can be easily integrated in many configurations to support information systems that satisfy the unique requirements of our community.
- We will do our best to ensure the sustainability of the software and practices we enable, and that we will incorporate an evolutionary approach to them as a key design goal.
- We will do our best to create an ecosystem of cooperating and collaborating projects to help enable making the world's information enduring and to sustain the required infrastructure.
...