Project Descriptions
Below are descriptions of the projects relating to the cooperative agreements between NDIIPP and its formal partners.
Web-at-Risk – A Distributed Approach to Preserving Our Nation's Political Cultural Heritage
California Digital Library at the University of California
The California Digital Library (CDL) and its partners are preserving important Web documents that would otherwise disappear. This work is critical: More than 65 percent of all government publications are now posted directly online without a print counterpart. The half-life of government Web pages is four months.
The project has saved important information about government activities, campaigns for elected office and political movements. To do so—and to help other libraries around the country—CDL is developing archiving tools to capture, store and provide long term access to Web information.
CDL has conducted a successful test of its Web Archiving Service tool. Seven more upcoming tests are expected over the next year and will expand functionality in areas such as capturing information according to thematic events and managing rights-protected content.
Partnering with CDL on the project are New York University, the University of North Texas, the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Stanford University, Sun Microsystems Inc., Arizona State Library and Archive, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Davis, the University of California at Irvine, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of California at Riverside, the University of California at San Diego, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of California at Santa Cruz and the National Library of France.
For more information visit: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/preservation/webatrisk/
National Geospatial Digital Archive (NGDA)
University of California at Santa Barbara
Digital geospatial imagery is now a critical tool for state and federal researchers of complex matters, including disaster relief, census data and land use management. It is used by federal agencies in their antiterrorism work as well.
Geospatial data is information relating to the location of, and relationships between, geographical features. It provides information about the shape and location of objects on the Earth’s surface. This information is transformed into powerful digital databases whose content can be used in applications as far-flung as managing utility distribution networks, monitoring pollution, planning alternative traffic patterns, redrawing voter districts, or tracking agricultural drought conditions.
The NGDA works at archiving geospatial data and images that are at risk of disappearing. Other features of the project include a geospatial format registry, common best practices for archiving digital geospatial data and policy agreements among the partners.
The University of California at Santa Barbara and Stanford University are working together to form the NGDA, a collecting network for the archiving of geographic information produced with spatial software. They have partnered to construct a nationwide digital collection and preservation system.
The NGDA has released its "NGDA Ingest System: Architecture and Development Guide," a detailed guide to the technical underpinnings of the NGDA archive. NGDA is also beta testing an exciting access system that allows the user to browse the geospatial data in the archive using maps.
Partnering with the University of California at Santa Barbara on the project is Stanford University.
For more information visit: http://www.ngda.org/research.php
Preserving Digital Public Television
Educational Broadcasting Corporation
Digitally produced public television programs are at great risk of being lost because rapid changes in technology make new video formats and equipment obsolete quickly. Currently there is little experience in how to save digital video productions over a long period of time.
The Preserving Digital Public Television project is spearheaded by Thirteen/WNET. They are working closely with WGBH, PBS and New York University to design an archive for the long-term preservation of public television programs being produced in a "born-digital" environment – in other words, no film is being used to record the programs. The four partners will focus on such influential series as "Nature," "American Masters," "NOVA" and "Frontline," which are increasingly being produced only in digital formats, including the new high-definition standard HDTV.
The Preserving Digital Public Television project has taken a leadership role in repository design and technical operations for preserving video. It has led efforts to find a resolution to the problem of determining a suitable video "wrapper" to bundle and preserve the connections between metadata (data that provides information about what was recorded) and programs so the programs can be retrieved later and played back.
Partnering with the Educational Broadcasting Corporation on this project are Thirteen/WNET, WGBH, the Public Broadcasting Service and New York University.
For more information visit: http://www.ptvdigitalarchive.org/
Preserving Digital Public Television (PDF, 23 Kb)
MetaArchive
Emory University
The MetaArchive Project is a collaboration among Emory University, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Florida State University, Auburn University and the University of Louisville. These partners are developing a networked, multi-institution archive of Southern digital culture by creating a distributed digital preservation network.
The partners are preserving institutional digital archives as well as short-lived works such as online exhibitions and cultural history Web site displays. This digital content includes a wide variety of subjects such as the Civil War, civil rights movement, slave narratives, Southern music, handicrafts and church history.
The members of the MetaArchive Project have formed a nonprofit corporation called the Educopia Institute. Educopia fosters growth, long-term sustainability, tools and a framework that can be adapted and used for its own needs, as well as those of future partnerships.
Partnering with Emory University on the project are Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Florida State University, Auburn University and the University of Louisville.
For more information visit: http://www.metaarchive.org/
ECHO DEPository – Exploring Collaborations to Harness Objects in a Digital Environment for Preservation
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is working with the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) and seven other partners to develop scalable software tools to facilitate selection and preservation of digital materials. The ECHO DEPository project addresses issues of how libraries collect, manage, preserve and make useful the enormous amount of digital information our culture is now producing.
Partners on this project collaborate to produce tools, practices, evaluations and research that will help in selecting and preserving electronic resources in a variety of digital repositories.
ECHO DEPository explores ways for libraries and repositories to share and preserve digital information in a wide variety of formats, including Web-based government publications, historical documents and photos, sound and video recordings, Web sites and other varied digital resources that will be of historical interest to future generations
Partnering with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on the project are the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), Tufts University, Michigan State University, Arizona State Library, Connecticut State Library, Illinois State Library, North Carolina State Library and Wisconsin State Library.
For more information visit: http://www.ndiipp.uiuc.edu/
Birth of the Dot Com Era
University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business
This project preserves at-risk digital materials from the American business culture during the early years of the commercialization of the Internet, from 1994 to 2001, the "Birth of the Dot Com Era."
Birth of the Dot Com Era collects content, including business, marketing and technical plans; venture presentations; and other business documents from more than 2,000 failed and successful Internet startups. The project collects materials through Web portals at www.businessplanarchive.org and www.dotcomarchive.org and through direct contact with former participants in the Dot Com Era.
In August 2006, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, authorized the creation of a special "closed archive" allowing a large subset of records from the failed law firm Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison to be preserved. Brobeck represented thousands of startups and high-tech investors during the Dot Com Era. The court approved a high-level set of principles that will now be translated into operating guidelines and procedures to govern the operation of the closed archive in the years to come. This closed archive will serve as a model of a trusted institutional repository.
Partnering with the University of Maryland on this project are Gallivan, Gallivan & O’Melia LLC; the George Mason University Center for History and New Media; Morrison & Foerster LLP; and Ropers Majeski Kohn & Bentley PC.
For more information visit: http://www.dotcomarchive.org/
Data-PASS (Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences)
University of Michigan Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
Data-PASS is a partnership devoted to identifying, acquiring and preserving data used for social science research. Examples of digital data preserved by this project include opinion polls, voting records, large-scale surveys on family growth and income, and focused studies on effects of events such as factory closings or the need to care for aging parents. While this information provides the full story of the social and cultural experience of America, a huge quantity of this data is missing or at-risk.
Together, the five Data-PASS partners are building a shared catalog, adopting a common standard for describing survey data and developing strategies for ensuring that the data remains available for analysis.
In June 2006, ICPSR published a shared catalog to the Web enabling the entire holdings of most Data-PASS partners to be searched and browsed. This feature also allows users to download and analyze many publicly accessible studies.
Partnering with ICPSR on the project are the University of Connecticut, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Archives and Records Administration.
For more information visit: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/DATAPASS/
North Carolina Geospatial Data Archiving Project (NCGDAP)
North Carolina State University
NCGDAP collects and preserves digital geospatial data resources, including digitized maps, from state and local government agencies in North Carolina. Although this project focuses solely on North Carolina, it serves as a demonstration project for other states.
Geospatial data is created by a wide range of state and local agencies for use in applications such as tax assessment, transportation planning, hazard analysis, health planning, political redistricting, homeland security and utilities management.
Partnering with NCSU on the project are the Geographic Information Coordinating Council, the North Carolina Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and NC OneMap.
For more information visit: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/ncgdap/index.html
SCOLA
The Library is working with SCOLA, a nonprofit educational corporation that receives and retransmits television news programming of long-term research value from around the world. These broadcasts are used by Congress in its lawmaking activities as well as by researchers.
SCOLA has agreements with approximately 90 countries to obtain and disseminate copies of foreign television programs. Under an agreement with the Library, SCOLA will archive thousands of hours of programming in digital form and make this content available for research. Examples include programming from the Al-Jazeera news channel, as well as from outlets in Pakistan, Russia and the Philippines.
LOCKSS
Making lots of copies of digital material and keeping it at various places helps to keep it safe, because if the material becomes lost or corrupted at one location, another location will have a perfect copy.
That is the premise behind Stanford University’s LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) digital archive pilot, which is helping the Library preserve electronic journals and other types of publications that are no longer distributed in print.
The Stanford project also includes work on a CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) initiative, which is a collaborative, community initiative to build a trusted, large-scale archive.
Portico
Electronic journals and other electronic resources have become a significant part of the scholarly record upon which students and researchers must rely, but keeping these resources available for the long term is a major challenge. Portico is developing a community-based approach to solving the problem of preserving these important resources. Portico is a partner that is developing a novel technical infrastructure and an economically sustainable business model for a continuing archiving service for scholarly resources published in electronic form.
E-Deposit for E-Journals
The E-Deposit for E-Journals project is part of a strategic effort to build an electronic copyright deposit system that will preserve electronic publications of cultural and intellectual value by enabling publishers to directly deposit their electronic works for registration. The Library of Congress is home to the U.S. Copyright Office.
Standard Disclaimer: Links to external Internet sites on Library of Congress Web pages do not constitute the Library's endorsement of the content of their Web sites or of their policies or products.