A Practical, Working and Replicable Approach to Digital Preservation: The MetaArchive of Southern Digital Culture

There is a critical need at the national and international level for more effective models of inter-institutional cooperation to preserve digital collections. While many projects have developed technologies and standards for isolated preservation efforts at individual institutions, there have been far fewer projects that mobilized ongoing efforts and consolidated costs across diffuse cultural heritage institutions. Six southeastern universities (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Florida State University, Auburn, and the University of Louisville, under the leadership of Emory University) have created a distributed digital preservation network for critical and at-risk content called the MetaArchive of Southern Digital Culture. We will present work towards “a national focus on policy, standards and technical components necessary to preserve digital content” in an inter-institutional model which is the charge as part of our partnership with the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. We will describe our progress at the one-and-a-half year mark including the development of the distributed preservation network infrastructure based on the modified LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) open-source software, cost and specifications for creating a preservation network, metadata issues for digital preservation, specific modifications conducted within the MetaArchive network for caching digital works that do not fit the standard model within the current LOCKSS journal format infrastructure, as well as our progress towards formalizing a collaborative agreement framework for ongoing distributed digital preservation.

http://www.metaarchive.org
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov

Handout (PDF)

Powerpoint Presentation