Abstract: The digital lifecycle encompasses definitive processes for data curation and management, long-term preservation, and dissemination, all of which are key building blocks in the development of a digital library. Maintaining a complete digital lifecycle workflow is vital to the preservation of digital cultural heritage and digital scholarship. This paper considers digital lifecycle programs for digital libraries, noting similarities between the digital and print lifecycles and referring to the example of the Digital Dunhuang project. Only through a systematic and sustainable digital lifecycle program can platforms for cross-disciplinary research and repositories for large aggregations of digital content be built. Moreover, advancing digital lifecycle development will ensure that knowledge and scholarship created in the digital age will have the same chances for survival that print-and-paper scholarship has had for centuries. It will also ensure that digital library users will have effective access to aggregated content across different domains and platforms.

Keywords: data management systems, arts and humanities, data storage and integration, document integration and text processing, digital lifecycle, digital preservation, digital asset management, Digital Dunhuang, preservation of world heritage