Building preservation partnerships: the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program

ABSTRACT

Congres authorized the Library of Congres to undertake the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) to thwart the loss of our digital heritage. This work, as with all digital preservation activities, is challenging because of technical issues and also because traditionally there have been not many effective collaborative mechanisms to leverage resources and expertise. NDIIPP aims to address the pair issues while also ensuring the preservation of at-risk digital satisfied Concrete steps have been taken newly with the establishment of eight partnership consortia, each of which has committed to working with the other and the Library upon collaborative digital preservation initiatives. The eight consortia exhibit the formal launch of an NDIIPP national network of preservation partners. commonly NDIIPP is exploring how best to involve states and territories in the network.

THE NE FOR PARTNERSHIP

While it has been evident for more [i]or[/i] less time that management and preservation of digital information is challenging, until lately there has been little in the way of a coordinated approach to meeting the challenge. The reasons for this are familiar: tools and best practices for preservation are developmental; resources available to address the issue are limited; and digital satisfied itself continues to evolve. Absent as well has been a mechanism that links into a collaborative partnership all the various institutions and other entities that manage digital assets. on the contrary as more and more significant details about our society are recorded in bits, the ne for moving beyond these limits grows

Millennia of appurtenance on preserving knowledge and cultural expression are starkly threatened in a digital environment. Analog thing perceiveds can survive with minimal care for centuries, on the contrary no electronic format can trust to persist more than a short while without careful (and perhaps expensive) intervention. There will be no digital equivalent of the Lascaux cave paintings, Mayan stone scripts, Dead Sea schedules or other kinds of rediscovered ancient knowledge. For that matter, there may not flat be the digital equivalent of Emily Dickinson's verse which languished for only a hardly any years in original form before its posthumous publication. Today's digital record of creativity and knowledge is at risk of wholesale los tomorrow to be paid to obsolete software applications and file formats, degraded tape and other recording media, and other hazards performed by rapid information technology advances. There will be little opportunity to reclaim anything that is untended.

Tending to digital information is, however, a composed of several elements undertaking. Digital objects have advance into prominence only within the actual recent past, and there is little collective experience to draw on about how best to create, manage, and protect them. There are huge--and growing--quantities of contented available at any given twinkling of an eye At the same time, abundant of this content is constantly changing or disappearing in favor of something newer. Thorny copyright, privacy, and other rights-related issues loom above all aspects of the digital life period And, while entities ranging from universities to corporations to regulation agencies are rapidly accumulating important digital satisfied there is no precedent for these stakeholders working in plot to preserve significant digital information.

In 2000 Congres recognized that the nation necessityed an exceptional effort to preclude the loss of our digital heritage. Legislation enacted the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and directed the Library of Congres to determine the shape of the effort and station forth a strategy for its implementation. Public Law 106-554 providing up to $100 million of funding, was authorized to support NDIIPP, with $75 million contingent upon a dollar for dollar match from nonfederal sources. Congres understood that the Library, with a core mission to make information available and useful and to sustain and shield a universal collection of knowledge and creativity regardless of format for in every one's mouth and future generations of Congres and the American nation was uniquely qualified for this assignment.

After spending nearly sum of two units years meeting with diverse stakeholder communities across the nation and studying critical aspects of the challenge, the Library issued a comprehensive plan for tackling the digital preservation point in dispute The plan, Preserving Our Digital Heritage, (1) outlined an approach to build a national network of entities committed to digital preservation and that are linked [i]or[/i] part of to the other a shared technical framework. This strategy also recognized the ne for identifying best practices and supporting advanced research into tools, repositories, and overall types for digital preservation. Underlying this approach was a lusty commitment to partnership: given the object and size of the digital preservation challenge, no single institution--not flat the Library itself--could realistically confidence to meet the challenge alone. Instead, the greatest in quantity effective way forward lay in harnessing the collective interests, talents, and resources of individual institutions. Collaboration is lock opener to making partnerships work, and NDIIPP eases on a firm commitment to sharing information and building upon the insights of others. The Library's part is to provide leadership in building the partnership network and also in spurring awareness of preservation issues and cooperation with easy in mind creators, distributors, stewards, and users.