Digital Libraries maintain information lifecycles for the digital objects contained therein. Typically these information lifecycles stipulate that a digital object is deleted at the end of its lifecycle. We propose a transient framework for digital libraries in which suitable objects are transformed through a state transition lifecycle thereby reducing the need to ever delete the digital object from the digital library, Transience works for certain media types and we describe and positively evaluate a prototype deployment in the domain of security video. ©2008 IEEE.