MetaArchive Cooperative NHPRC
From Digital Innovations @ Emory Libraries
METAARCHIVE COOPERATIVE TO OFFER NATIONWIDE DIGITAL PRESERVATION
Services Available to Libraries, Historical Societies, Other Cultural Repositories
ATLANTA, GA -- Groundbreaking digital preservation services developed at Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library are now being offered to libraries, archives, government agencies, historical societies and other U.S. cultural repositories.
With the backing of a $300,330 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) [1], The MetaArchive Cooperative, a community-based digital preservation network, has transitioned from a regional project to a sustainable international digital preservation endeavor. The five-year-old cooperative, which includes the United Kingdom and multiple universities in five states, was granted not-for-profit business status in January 2008 and has begun to offer distributed digital preservation to cultural memory organizations nationwide, says Martin Halbert, Ph.D., director of digital programs and systems at Emory University.
“Distributed digital preservation ensures that vital electronic material is duplicated and preserved on a wide array of secure computer servers in diverse geographical locations,” Halbert said. “We are essentially doing for digital materials what libraries and archives have done for paper collections for millennia. The next generation will have little information about the early digital years unless we act now to preserve what we produce as a culture.”
The cooperative also will provide information and training opportunities for institutions and individuals by hosting a workshop series and publishing a Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation, said Katherine Skinner, Ph.D., program manager and digital projects librarian at Emory.
“Our goal is to encourage the adoption of distributed digital preservation,” Skinner said. “In addition to welcoming new members into the cooperative and our existing networks, we also encourage other cultural memory institutions to freely adopt our technical and administrative frameworks to form new networks of their own.”
The MetaArchive approach to digital preservation relies upon a distributed preservation network infrastructure that is based on the Open Source LOCKSS software developed at Stanford University. “Distributed” means that copies of digital materials are stored on servers in different geographical spaces (e.g., in different states or countries). Those servers are networked together so that they are constantly in contact with one another. If something happens to a file—perhaps because it degrades naturally or because the geographical region in which it is located suffers a catastrophe (e.g., Hurricane Katrina)—the network will check all other copies of the file. After determining that all other copies are intact and identical, the network can rebuild that degraded or lost file as needed to replace the lost material, thus ensuring its stability over time.
Digital materials are terribly fragile, and their development is occurring at warp speeds. Websites, for example, exist for fewer than 100 days on average, and millions of new pages are created each day. Anyone with a floppy disc knows that it takes no more than a few years for a file storage device to become outmoded and nearly impossible to use. Capturing the files stored on computers, the internet and various types of storage devices in a timely manner — especially those produced by such key groups as governments, scholars, journalists, artists and scientists—is essential for ensuring that we have record of our cultural output that is consistent with the records preserved in past centuries.
In the print world, libraries and archives have attained centuries of experience in protecting and preserving artifacts that are important to our understanding of our history and culture, Halbert noted. “As we move from a print-based society to one driven by digital media, we need to build similar expertise in preserving the computer files and programs that comprise our historical record—including such diverse items as presidential e-mails, computer files of birth and death records, and prominent novelists’ digital manuscripts,” Halbert said.
The MetaArchive Cooperative (http://MetaArchive.org) is an independent, international membership association whose purpose is to support, promote, and extend the MetaArchive approach to distributed digital preservation practices. The NHPRC-funded project described here is led by the MetaScholar Initiative in Woodruff Library’s Digital Programs and Systems division of Emory University—a group that has earned its national reputation as a leader in the fields of Digital Library research and Internet-based scholarly communication. In the past five years, the division has received more than $4.5 million in grant support for projects and programs that promote new ways of conducting research and scholarship in the digital age. This project is undertaken in collaboration with the Georgia Tech Libraries.
The Emory University Libraries in Atlanta and Oxford, Ga., are dedicated to fostering courageous inquiry among students and scholars at Emory University and around the world. The nine libraries' holdings include more than 3.1 million print and electronic volumes, 40,000-plus electronic journals, and internationally renowned special collections.
Emory University is one of the nation's leading private research universities and a member of the Association of American Universities. Known for its demanding academics, outstanding undergraduate college of arts and sciences, highly ranked professional schools and state-of-the-art research facilities, Emory is ranked as one of the country's top 20 national universities by U.S. News & World Report. In addition to its nine schools, the university encompasses The Carter Center, Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory Healthcare, the state's largest and most comprehensive health care system.
