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

ABSTRACT

Congress authorized the Library of Congress to undertake the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) to prevent 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 few effective collaborative mechanisms to leverage resources and expertise. NDIIPP aims to address both issues while also ensuring the preservation of at-risk digital content. Concrete steps have been taken recently with the establishment of eight partnership consortia, each of which has committed to working with the other and the Library on collaborative digital preservation initiatives. The eight consortia represent the formal launch of an NDIIPP national network of preservation partners. Currently, NDIIPP is exploring how best to involve states and territories in the network.

THE NEED FOR PARTNERSHIP

While it has been evident for some time that management and preservation of digital information is challenging, until recently 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 content 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. But as more and more significant details about our society are recorded in bits, the need for moving beyond these limits grows.

Millennia of dependency on preserving knowledge and cultural expression are starkly threatened in a digital environment. Analog objects can survive with minimal care for centuries, but no electronic format can hope 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 scrolls, or other kinds of rediscovered ancient knowledge. For that matter, there may not even be the digital equivalent of Emily Dickinson's poetry, which languished for only a few years in original form before its posthumous publication. Today's digital record of creativity and knowledge is at risk of wholesale loss tomorrow due to obsolete software applications and file formats, degraded tape and other recording media, and other hazards wrought by rapid information technology advances. There will be little opportunity to recover anything that is untended.

Tending to digital information is, however, a complex undertaking. Digital objects have come into prominence only within the very recent past, and there is little collective experience to draw upon about how best to create, manage, and preserve them. There are huge--and growing--quantities of content available at any given moment. At the same time, much of this content is constantly changing or disappearing in favor of something newer. Thorny copyright, privacy, and other rights-related issues loom over all aspects of the digital life cycle. And, while entities ranging from universities to corporations to government agencies are rapidly accumulating important digital content, there is no precedent for these stakeholders working in concert to preserve significant digital information.

In 2000 Congress recognized that the nation needed an exceptional effort to prevent the loss of our digital heritage. Legislation enacted the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and directed the Library of Congress to determine the shape of the effort and set 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 on a dollar for dollar match from nonfederal sources. Congress understood that the Library, with a core mission to make information available and useful and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity regardless…