Digital Preservation Initiatives in the United States A Summary Deanna B. Marcum

Context In U.S., preservation traditionally a distributed activity Each library or archives responsible for its own holdings and for providing services for its users

Context National collection = sum of the individual activities

Context Physical artifacts are assets that belong to the library or archives Information contained in artifacts may or may not belong to the institution Intellectual property rights often stay with creator

4 Types of activities Common understandings among stakeholders Practical preservation activity Experimental preservation activity Preservation research

Stakeholders with an interest Creators Publishers Archival repositories

All have different interests and motivations

Each has a stake in long term preservation

Understandings among stakeholders Selection of single or standard formats Agreements on terms or conditions for distribution of archived information What constitutes a trusted repository Open Archival Information System (OAIS) as the standard reference model

4 Commonly understood technical approaches Migration (including technology preservation) Emulation Persistent Object Preservation Digital Archeology (data mining)

Practical Preservation Activity NARA - electronic records Commercial publishers - archiving e- journals Non-profits - reformatting collections and building archival repositories Service organizations - digital archives for library community

Practical Preservation Activity Data creators and data users combining efforts to preserve a body of material - NLM’s creation of PubMed Central Snapshots of the Web - Internet Archive

Experimental Preservation Activity InterPARES - develop theoretical and methodological knowledge essential for permanent preservation of records generated electronically NARA - strategic and technical framework within which it may preserve electronic records

Experimental Preservation Activity The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation - e- journal archiving project Stanford University - LOCKSS software tools IBM Almaden Research Center - universal virtual machine for digital preservation

Preservation Research Architecture and performance of archival repositories Persistent identification and naming of archived information Methods for recording and ensuring authenticity of archived information Degradation and testing of magnetic and other media

Preservation Research Attributes of preservable digital information Attributes of trusted archival repositories Development of standards related to digital archives Automatic copying and distribution of digital information Cornell’s PRISM

Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP)

Library of Congress $100 million in three phases

Library of Congress Advisory Committee Stakeholder Meetings Plan for Congressional approval

LC Learnings No single technological fix Include both “born digital” and “reborn digital” materials Rights to archive; permission to access Who should pay remains the vexing question

More research needed Architectures for persistent digital repositories Preservation technology and tools Attributes of archived collections Policy and economic models

Scenario Planning What are the possible futures? What is the likely future? How does LC plan to the future?