Preservation Societies

Numerous projects, mostly government-sponsored, have put some serious money behind global digital preservation efforts over the past decade.

Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Domesday Book, 1086

In December 2000, the U.S. Congress appropriated US $99.8 million for a national digital preservation effort. Led by the Library of Congress, the project is known as the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. The program is funding research in various aspects of digital preservation, including collection practices, risk analyses, legal and policy issues, and technology.

Similarly, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration has been building the Electronic Records Archives since 1998. ERA's goal is to better handle the problem of managing and preserving official electronic records and to help push a governmentwide move to electronic records management. It aims to capture electronic information, regardless of format; save it permanently; and make it accessible on whatever hardware or software is in use in the future. When operational, ERA will make it easy for the public and government officials to find records they want and for the National Archives to deliver those records in formats people need.

In the United Kingdom, a close call with digital oblivion launched several groups and related projects. The Domesday Project, a £2.5 million BBC effort to put the famous 1086 Domesday Book into a digital, multimedia format, began in 1986. By the year 2002, however, all the technology involved—the specialized computers, 12-inch videodisks, and custom software—was totally obsolete, and millions of pounds more were required to recover the items and complete the project.

This setback led to some badly needed central government funding to create a Digital Preservation Focus project within the Joint Information Systems Committee, the body that funds the UK's information technology infrastructure in higher education. That program in turn has spawned organizations like the Digital Preservation Coalition, in Heslington, England, which examines preservation practices, and the Digital Curation Centre, in Edinburgh, Scotland, which provides expertise and support for practitioners.

The mass of data uploaded to the Web every minute poses another huge challenge. The national libraries of 11 countries and the Internet Archive, in San Francisco, have banded together to form the International Internet Preservation Consortium, based in Paris. This group has embarked on an ambitious project to archive the various national Webs, or at least the parts with which governments concern themselves.

Another major preservation program is LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), an initiative led by the Stanford University Libraries. Now used by more than 80 institutions worldwide, this open-source, peer-to-peer system runs on standard desktop computers and is specifically aimed at collecting, storing, and providing access via the Web to the local copies of electronic journals purchased by institutional libraries. The idea is for each LOCKSS desktop machine to monitor sister machines at other participating institutions so that, with the publisher's permission, missing or damaged content can be quickly replaced or repaired. Such a system, LOCKSS proponents say, eliminates the need for backups as well as for manual auditing and restoration.