The AHDS is significant for digital preservation as an early example of collab- oration in data archiving, that is, a centrally managed distributed model. (This section is based on Beagrie (2001) and information from the AHDS web site (ahds.ac.uk)).
UK Web Archiving Consortium (www.webarchive.org.uk)
The UK Web Archiving Consortium was launched in June 2004 as one of the key outcomes of a web archiving feasibility study commissioned in 2002 by JISC and the Wellcome Library. A coalition of the British Library as the lead partner, JISC, the National Archives (UK), the Wellcome Trust, and the national libraries of Scotland and Wales, the Web Archiving Consortium has the goal of investi- gating archiving solutions for UK web materials. Each institution will focus on a particular subject area, for instance the Wellcome Library on medical sites.
The National Library of Australia’s PANDAS software, further developed to match UK requirements, and software based on the open source web crawler HTTrack will be used. The project is planned to run for two years and has an initial target of 6000 sites. (This section is based on information from the Web Archiving Consortium’s web site (www.webarchive.org.uk)).
• ‘working collaboratively together and with industry and research organisa- tions, to address shared challenges in digital preservation’ (DPC Annual Report,2003–04, p.1).
Its activities in 2002–2004 included an advocacy campaign (for example, publishing articles and issuing news items), representation and advocacy (such as making presentations at conferences), dissemination and current awareness (through its web site, collaboration with the National Library of Australia to produce the e-newsletter What’s New in Digital Preservation, and e-mail discus- sion lists), forums and training workshops, a survey of industry vendors, work on a National Needs Survey on Digital Preservation, its Technology Watch, and surveying DPC members as part of a UK-wide needs assessment exercise (DPC Annual Report, 2002–03, 2003–04). The DPC co-sponsors a Digital Preservation Award as part of the Pilgrim Trust Conservation Awards. The inaugural award, in 2004, went to National Archives (UK) for their Digital Archive; other shortlisted projects were the CAMiLEON Project, the JISC Continuing Access and Digital Preservation Strategy, the National Library of New Zealand’s Preservation Metadata Extraction Tool, and the Wellcome Library/JISC Web Archiving Project. The DPC’s collaborative activities are not limited to the UK:
for example, it has signed Memoranda of Understanding with the National Library of Australia and the Library of Congress’s NDIIPP (Jones, 2004).
The significance of the DPC for digital preservation lies in its active encour- agement of digital preservation through its lobbying and promotional activities.
It is being emulated in other countries; for example, the German Network of Expertise in Long-Term Storage of Digital Resources (NESTOR), led by Deutsche Bibliothek, states that its long-term goal is to develop ‘a permanent distributed infrastructure for long-term preservation and long-term accessibility of digital resources in Germany comparable to e.g. The Digital Preservation Coalition in the UK’ (www.langzeitarchivierung.de). (This section is based on Beagrie (2001), the DPC Annual Reports for 2002–03 and 2003–04, Jones (2004), Simpson (2004b) and information from the Digital Preservation Coalition’s web site (www.dpconline.org)).
NDIIPP (www.digitalpreservation.gov)
The US-based National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) is led by the Library of Congress. Federal legislation estab- lished this programme in December 2000 with US$100 million in funding, US$25 million being made available to the programme and a further US$75 million to be made available if it matched the amount from non-federal government sources. NDIIPP’s goals are to develop a national digital collection and preserva- tion strategy, to work with other stakeholders to establish partnerships and form networks, to help identify and preserve at-risk digital content, and to support the development of tools, models, and methods for digital preservation.
Collaboration lies at the heart of the NDIIPP, and is in fact mandated by the legislation that created it, with collaboration expected between the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Library of Medicine, National Agricultural Library, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and other federal agencies as well as non-federal organizations and institutions. Since its establishment the NDIIPP has sought participation from a wide range of organizations (Hodge and Frangakis, 2004, p.62).
1111 2 3 4 51 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 211 3 4 5 6 71 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45 46 47 48 49 50111
National initiatives and collaborations 175
Principal activities of the NDIIPP to date have included convening stakeholder meetings in 2001, commissioning environmental scans, and presenting a plan to Congress in 2003. The NDIIPP commissioned a report on international digital preservation activities for its own information, the initiatives surveyed being selected for their relevance and interest to NDIIPP (Beagrie, 2003). In mid-2004 Version 2.0 of the Technical Architecture for NDIIPP was released for review and comment, and NDIIPP entered into a partnership with the National Science Foundation to fund research programmes in digital preservation. In June 2004 the Library of Congress announced that it would collaborate with Old Dominion, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Harvard Universities in an Archive Ingest and Handling Test that would investigate strategies for the ingest and preservation of digital archives. Each partner would work with the same collection of digital materials, 12 gigabytes of materials with a wide range of file formats relating to the events of 11 September 2001 made available by George Mason University.
The outcomes of this research will include better identification of possible archi- tectures, better costing data, and clearer identification, documentation and dissemination of working methods for preserving digital materials.
In September 2004 the NDIIPP awarded US$15 million to eight US consortia for three-year projects to identify, collect and preserve digital materials within a nationwide digital preservation infrastructure. To illustrate the extent of these projects, one of these consortia is led by the California Digital Library (University of California) with New York University Libraries, University of North Texas Libraries, and the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge as partners, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Stanford University Computer Science Depart- ment, and Sun Microsystems as collaborators. It will develop web archiving tools to capture and preserve web-based collections of government and political information. Another programme is aimed at establishing procedures, structures and national standards for preserving public television programmes produced in digital formats, and a third will develop criteria for determining which digital materials to capture and preserve. The NDIIPP is in 2005 exploring collabora- tive arrangements with US state and territory governments to develop strategies for preserving information produced by state and local government jurisdictions in digital form.
After five years, the NDIIPP considers its achievements to include developing a network of 50 to 75 partners, establishing a large archive of at-risk content, and making recommendations to the US Congress about the long-term gover- nance of a national digital preservation programme. The NDIIPP is being keenly observed by digital preservation interest groups throughout the world.
With such large resources at its command it stands a good chance of providing tools that will revolutionize how digital preservation is carried out. (This section is based principally on information from the NDIIPP’s web site (www.
digitalpreservation.gov).)
Digital Preservation Testbed (www.digitaleduurzaamheid.nl/home.cfm)
The Digital Preservation Testbed (Testbed Digitale Bewaring) was established by the Dutch Government as a three-year project to run from October 2000 to September 2003. It was part of a wider initiative, the Digitale Duurzaamheid Project, which established a Taskforce Digitale Duurzaamheid (Digital Longevity Taskforce) to coordinate and share the expertise of government organizations in
176 Digital Preservation Initiatives and Collaborations
the Netherlands about digital information management. The Digital Preservation Testbed project was launched as part of this initiative. Based at the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands, it carried out research into the digital preservation techniques of migration, emulation, and XML, applying them to a range of digital materials such as text documents, spreadsheets, e-mail messages, and databases. Each technique was assessed for its technical effectiveness as a long- term preservation method, as well as for cost factors and other aspects. Reports of the project are available on the web. (This section is based on Beagrie (2003, p.28) and information available on the web site of the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands (www.digitaleduurzaamheid.nl/home.cfm)).