title: Passive Digital Preservation on Paper in Practice
creators: Vincent Joguin Jean-Noël Dumont
abstract: Radioactive waste management encompasses timescales ranging from centuries to hundreds of thousands of years.  Therefore, it is concerned with the long-term preservation of complex analog and digital information that are key to safeguarding the environment and human health against the potential threat of radioactive waste.  The multi-century timescale and criticality of the radioactive waste repositories call for information preservation strategies based on durable, robust and secure data carriers and technologies.<br />Andra, the French national radioactive waste management agency, uses permanent paper to archive analog material.  Over 2020 and 2021, it tested the Micr’Olonys solution from Eupalia, a novel approach to transcribe digital data on paper for passive long-term retention and accessibility.<br />This paper presents the results of transcribing a database concerning waste packages stored at the first repository operated by Andra, producing a 464-page document instead of a million pages that plain text printing would have required.<br />
keywords: database passive permanent paper nuclear