A really good resource for those just getting acquainted with digital preservation is MetaArchive‘s recently-released “A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation,” availble in PDF format, or orderable in paper form through their site.  Per MetaArchive’s announcement:

This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways.

Definitely something that I think every digital archivist and technophile should have in their virtual library.