I'm sure that some of you will get multiple copies of this (apologies
for adding to that), but it is important enough to send out here to make
sure we all see it. And congratulations to DLF institutions named
below.
David
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Public Affairs Office
101 Independence Avenue SE
Washington DC 20540-1610
Phone (202) 707-2905
Fax (202) 707-9199
E-mail [log in to unmask]
September 30, 2004
Contact:
Guy Lamolinara (202) 707-9217; [log in to unmask]
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ANNOUNCES AWARDS OF $15 MILLION TO BEGIN BUILDING A
NETWORK OF PARTNERS FOR DIGITAL PRESERVATION
Eight Institutions and Their Partners to Participate in National Program
The Library of Congress today is making awards totaling more than $14.9
million to eight institutions and their partners to identify, collect
and preserve digital materials within a nationwide digital preservation
infrastructure. These awards from the Library will be matched
dollar-for-dollar by the winning institutions in the form of cash,
in-kind or other resources. The institutions will share
responsibilities for preserving at-risk digital materials of significant
cultural and historical value to the nation.
Because there is usually no analog (physical) version of materials
created solely in digital formats, these so-called "born-digital"
materials are at much greater risk of either being lost and no longer
available as historical resources, or of being altered -preventing
future researchers from studying them in their original form. Millions
of digital materials, such as Web sites mounted in the early days of the
Internet, are already lost - either completely or in their original
versions.
The preservation projects that will receive Library of Congress funding
include digital content relating to important people, events and
movements that have had a major impact on the nation's history, such as
the birth of the "dot com" era, satellite mapping, public television
programs, historical aerial photography, and opinion polls and voting
records.
The Library of Congress is leading this massive digital preservation
program to help ensure that the students, historians and lifelong
learners of tomorrow will be able to study these subjects and others
with the same degree of comprehensiveness and reliability that
historians of the past enjoyed when they were studying less ephemeral
analog materials. These awards are the next step in a multiphase
process (see "Background" below) to solve complex problems of
collecting, preserving and making available digital content.
The program the Library of Congress has undertaken is officially named
the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program
(NDIIPP). This initiative will be carried out through the establishment
of a national network of partners, such as those named today, that are
committed to digital preservation. The partners will collaborate in a
digital preservation architecture with defined roles and
responsibilities. In 2000, the U.S. Congress asked the Library of
Congress to lead this effort.
Commenting on the initiative, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington
said: "The Library of Congress looks forward to its collaboration with
these institutions, all of which are dedicated to the preservation of
our nation's cultural and historical heritage, in all its forms. As
materials are increasingly being created in digital form only, it
becomes ever more critical to save the important information they
contain so that future generations will continue to benefit from, and
build upon, the achievements of previous generations. During the 10th
year of the Library's National Digital Library Program, these awards are
especially meaningful."
"The Library and NDIIPP have reached an important milestone today," said
Associate Librarian for Strategic Initiatives Laura E. Campbell, who is
leading NDIIPP for the Library of Congress. "These formal partnerships
mark the beginning of a new phase of this program to raise awareness of
the need for digital preservation and to take steps to capture and
preserve at-risk digital content that is vital to our nation's history."
Today's awards are the result of a "Program Announcement to Support
Building a Network of Partners" issued by the Library on Aug. 12, 2003.
The deadline for submitting applications was Nov. 12, 2003. The Program
Announcement can be viewed at www.digitalpreservation.gov/announcement/.
All applications were subjected to a peer-review process administered by
the National Endowment for the Humanities. Librarian of Congress
Billington made the final selections.
Following are the winning lead institutions, their partner institutions
and the subject area of the project. The amounts are approximate and
subject to change:
Lead institution: University of California, Office of the President
(California Digital Library).
Partners: University of North Texas and New York University.
Subject: This award is for the collection of Web-based materials
produced by local, state, regional and federal government agencies and
other organizations that try to educate the public and influence
government. The archives that will be built, using tools developed to
capture and preserve these materials, will focus on local political
activities and movements, such as the California gubernatorial recall
election of 2003. Amount of award: $2,712,117.
Lead institution: University of California at Santa Barbara.
Partner: Stanford University.
Subject: These institutions will lead the formation of a National
Geospatial Federated Digital Repository to design an infrastructure and
collect materials across the spectrum of geographic formats. The
born-digital materials to be collected and preserved will range from
LANDSAT imagery to other cartographic content from university, corporate
and government resources as well as Web sites. The repository will
preserve content vital for the study of history, science, environmental
policy, urban and population studies, census construction and analysis,
and other fields requiring U.S. geospatial information. Amount of award:
$2,937,742.
Lead institution: Educational Broadcasting Corporation (EBC)
(Thirteen/WNET New York).
Partners: WGBH Educational Foundation, Boston, Mass.; Public
Broadcasting Service (PBS), Alexandria, Va.; New York University (NYU),
N.Y.
Subject: Partners in this project will collaborate to establish the
first procedures, structures and national standards necessary to
preserve public television programs produced in digital formats. EBC and
WGBH are the two largest producers of public television content in the
United States. Through PBS, their productions are made available to
audiences from coast-to-coast. Together, these three entities produce
and distribute the majority of public television in the United States.
NYU is home to one of America's most distinguished research libraries
and has become a major player in the field of digital preservation of
moving images. The four partners will focus on such influential series
as "Nature," "American Masters," "NOVA" and "Frontline," which are
increasingly being produced only in digital formats, including the new
high-definition standard (HDTV). The project will also examine issues
associated with the preservation of important corollary conten!
t, such as Web sites that accompany broadcasts. Amount of award:
$2,846,625.
Lead institution: Emory University.
Partners: The University of Louisville Libraries, Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University Libraries, Florida State University,
Auburn University Libraries, Georgia Institute of Technology Library and
Information Center.
Subject: This project will develop a MetaArchive of Southern Cultural
Heritage (www.metaarchive.org) by creating a distributed digital
preservation network for critical and at-risk content relative to
Southern culture and history. The partners will select and preserve
institutional digital archives, as well as ephemeral works such as
online exhibitions and cultural history Web site displays. This body of
digital content includes a wide variety of subjects complementary to
Library of Congress collections such as the Civil War, the civil rights
movement, slave narratives, Southern music, handicrafts and church
history. Amount of award: $690,390.
Lead institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library,
Graduate School of Library and Information Science and National Center
for Supercomputing Applications.
Partners: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Tufts University Perseus
Project, Michigan State University Library, and an alliance of state
library agencies from Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina and
Wisconsin.
Subject: This project will develop criteria for determining which
digital materials to capture and preserve, as not all digital material
can or should be preserved. These materials will include sound and
video recordings, historical aerial photography, Web-based government
publications from the partner states, and primary and secondary
historical materials made available by the Perseus Project. Amount of
award: $2,753,451.
Lead institution: University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of
Business.
Partners: George Mason University Center for New Media; Gallivan,
Gallivan and O'Melia LLC; Snyder, Miller, Orton Lawyers LLP; and the
Internet Archive.
Subject: This project will preserve at-risk digital materials from the
American business culture during the early years of the
commercialization of the Internet -the "Birth of the Dot Com Era,"
specifically 1994-2001. The materials, collected through Web portals at
www.businessplanarchive.org and www.dotcomarchive.org and through direct
contact with former participants in the Dot Com Era, will be of
incalculable historical value to Americans eager to make sense of this
remarkable period of venture creation. Amount of award: $220,000.
Lead institution: University of Michigan Inter-university Consortium for
Political and Social Research.
Partners: The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University
of Connecticut, the Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social
Science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the Henry A.
Murray Research Center at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard, the
Electronic and Special Media Records Service Division of the National
Archives and Records Administration and the Harvard-MIT Data Center.
Subject: These institutions will create a partnership to identify,
acquire and preserve data used in the study of social science to ensure
that future generations of Americans have access to this vital digital
material that will allow them to understand their nation, its social
organization and its policies and politics. Examples of data that will
be preserved are opinion polls, voting records, large-scale surveys on
family growth and income, and focused studies on effects of events such
as factory closings or the need to care for aging parents. Together the
partners will build a shared catalog, adopt a common standard for
describing survey data and develop strategies for ensuring that the data
remains available for analysis. Amount of award: $2,182,332.
Lead institution: North Carolina State University Libraries.
Partner: North Carolina Center for Geographic Information & Analysis.
Subject: The project will collect and preserve digital geospatial data
resources, including digitized maps, from state and local government
agencies in North Carolina. Geospatial data are created by a wide range
of state and local agencies for use in applications such as tax
assessment, transportation planning, hazard analysis, health planning,
political redistricting, homeland security and utilities management.
Although this project will focus solely on North Carolina, it is
expected to serve as a demonstration project for other states. Amount
of award: $534,713.
BACKGROUND
In December 2000 Congress authorized the Library of Congress to develop
and execute a congressionally approved plan for a National Digital
Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. A $99.8 million
congressional appropriation was made to establish the program.
According to Conference Report (H. Rept. 106-1033), "The overall plan
should set forth a strategy for the Library of Congress, in
collaboration with other federal and nonfederal entities, to identify a
national network of libraries and other organizations with
responsibilities for collecting digital materials that will provide
access to and maintain those materials. * In addition to developing this
strategy, the plan shall set forth, in concert with the Copyright
Office, the policies, protocols and strategies for the long-term
preservation of such materials, including the technological
infrastructure required at the Library of Congress."
The legislation mandates that the Library work with federal entities
such as the Secretary of Commerce, the director of the White House
Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Archives and
Records Administration, the National Library of Medicine, the National
Agricultural Library, the National Institute of Standards and Technology
and "other federal, research and private libraries and institutions with
expertise in telecommunications technology and electronic commerce
policy." The goal is to build a network of committed partners working
through a preservation architecture with defined roles and
responsibilities.
The Library of Congress digital strategy is being formulated in concert
with a study, commissioned by the Librarian of Congress and undertaken
by the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications
Board. "LC 21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress" was
issued July 26, 2000, and made several recommendations, including that
the Library, working with other institutions, take the lead in the
preservation and archiving of digital materials.
The complete text of the "Plan for the National Digital Information
Infrastructure and Preservation Program" is available at
www.digitalpreservation.gov. This includes an explanation of how the
plan was developed, who the Library worked with to develop the plan and
the key components of the digital preservation infrastructure. The plan
was approved by Congress in December 2002.
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world. Through
its National Digital Library (NDL) Program, it is also one of the
leading providers of noncommercial intellectual content on the Internet
(www.loc.gov). The NDL Program's flagship American Memory project, in
collaboration with other institutions nationwide, makes freely available
more than 8.5 million American historical items.
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PR 04-171
09/30/04
ISSN 0731-3527
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