Interview Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Interview with the MetaArchive Project, Page 4
Will the materials draw only from Emory and its partners or will you be seeking materials from throughout the South, as you define it?
Expediency dictates that most of the materials we preserve will come from our own and our partner institutions’ collections. However, we have not limited our efforts to preserving only those materials, as the larger goal of collaboratively preserving the digital cultural heritage of the American South necessitates looking beyond our own materials to locate objects and collections that capture the Southern way of life and that are in danger of being lost to future scholars.
For example, the Emory University MetaScholar Initiative recently undertook the preservation of digital-audiotape (DAT) recordings of original interviews used in the radio program American Routes. These original and unduplicated recordings constitute both at-risk materials and Southern cultural materials: they capture the character and voices of musicians and music of the coastal South; and the DATs of these interviews, which were rescued from a building in New Orleans’ French Quarter in November 2005, are "at risk" not only because they have no duplicates but also because digital-audiotapes are a discontinued medium, for which players are no longer being manufactured. Poor storage conditions following Hurricane Katrina threatened to destroy these tapes and with them, voices and sounds that have helped distinguish Gulf Coast cultures and Southern music. Over the next year Emory’s MetaScholar Initiative plans to digitize more than 250 hours of these DATs.
You will be using a "distributed preservation network infrastructure based on the LOCKSS software." How did you determine to use this approach?
The ease and minimal cost of using this system, combined with its ability to ensure the integrity of copies, recommended it to our project. LOCKSS software allows for a peer-to-peer decentralized approach to protecting, sharing and providing persistent access to digital resources. What this means in this context is that there is no one central location in which these things are stored. Instead, in the LOCKSS model, one literally makes "Lots of Copies" to "Keep Stuff Safe," and those copies are kept at the various nodes of the partner institutions. So, instead of having things locked down at a storage facility, we have things LOCKSSed at six institutions: Emory University, Auburn University, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, the University of Louisville and Florida State University.
Each replicates the collections of all others. If a disaster struck, it would have to encompass all of those schools and locations in order to cause a catastrophic loss of our digital heritage. By creating multiple copies of the same content, continually referencing these copies to each other to repair incongruities and storing these copies in several different locations rather than one central location, we better ensure the long-term preservation and accessibility of digital content.
In the course of this project, we will expand the size of digital objects that the LOCKSS system has preserved to date, essentially pushing the frontiers of LOCKSS itself. For instance, Emory University’s Internet-only journal Southern Spaces, currently 160 billion bytes in size, exemplifies the types of born-digital materials that digital preservation efforts must learn to accommodate. In many ways this project will not simply maintain the future accessibility of digital cultural heritage materials on the American South but also help to enhance technology available for preserving the growing array of digital materials.
Interview Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
