An important challenge for digital preservation is getting agreement on an architecture that can persist in the face of changing technology, thus allowing independent technology choices to be made over time. Seven critical aspects of such an architecture are discussed in this talk, namely 1) the structure of information represented in digital form and the means of identifying it, 2) assuring that the elements within the structure can be interpreted as originally intended over time, 3) providing for interoperability with integrated security, 4) specifying levels of abstraction for metadata, its connection with the associated “data”, and enabling it to support evolution of searching techniques, 5) simplifying access to digital information, especially information preserved long ago, 6) determining relevant performance metrics for implementations of the architecture and 7) evaluating the performance of such implementations. Another important challenge is to develop and evolve the social structures required for effective management and evolution of the architecture. The Digital Object Architecture represents an excellent opportunity for the preservation community to embrace and will be briefly discussed along with possible social structures to enable the architecture to persist and evolve.