The University of Louisville participates in a federally-funded partnership, the MetaArchive Cooperative, to develop a protocol for the distributed preservation of digital cultural heritage materials

Howard, Rachel

English

University of Louisville

University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Faculty Scholarship Summer 2008 Preserving digital information. Rachel Howard University of Louisville, rachel.howard@louisville.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/faculty  Part of the Archival Science Commons Original Publication Information This was originally published in the "Preservation Perspectives" column of Kentucky Libraries, volume 72, issue 3, in Summer 2008. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. For more information, please contact thinkir@louisville.edu. KENTUCKY LIBRARIES • VOLUME 72 • NUMBER 316ibrary preservation strategies have longhad to adapt to accommodate modifications informats and materials. For example, in themid-19th century the demand of an increas-ingly literate population for reading materialsled to changes in paper-making, from high-quality linen or cotton rag stock to moreabundant (and acidic) wood pulp, resulting in“brittle books” as the paper aged. Librariansand archivists mobilized behind the issue inthe 1970s, which led to the dedication ofresources to offset the problem of yellowing,fragile pages, including federal grants forpreservation reformatting and climate andhumidity controlled environments; the cre-ation of standards for the permanence ofpaper, and of educational and job opportuni-ties in the field of preservation; and the devel-opment of technology for mass deacidification. Since that time, the environment in whichwe create and consume research and scholar-ship, personal, artistic, and journalistic docu-mentation, and entertainment has becomeincreasingly dependent on digital files, soft-ware, and equipment. So, we are now facedwith the challenge of preserving digital infor-mation-only this time, we need to concernourselves with “bit rot,” or the decay of infor-mation within a digital file; hardware, soft-ware, and format obsolescence; and servercrashes and other disasters. Fortunately, librar-ians again have had the foresight to begin tocreate solutions before we enter what somedoomsayers have called a “digital dark age” ofinformation loss. The lifespan of born-digitaland digitized materials can be extendedthrough proper storage, backups, and docu-mentation that will enable them to be migrat-ed or their playback mechanisms to be emu-lated in the future. Once again, large-scaleinitiatives are providing much-needed fundingand attention to preservation issues.The Library of Congress initiated the NationalDigital Information and InfrastructurePreservation Program (NDIIPP) in 2000 inorder to make digital information holding ourhistory and heritage available and accessiblefor future generations.1 The University ofLouisville is participating in an NDIIPP-fund-ed partnership called the MetaArchiveCooperative, where, along with five otherSoutheastern research libraries, we have devel-oped a protocol for the distributed preserva-tion of digital cultural heritage materials.2The MetaArchive approach is based on theopen-source Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe(LOCKSS) software developed at StanfordUniversity in the late 1990s and originallyintended for the preservation of electronicjournals.3 LOCKSS harnesses the power oflibrarians worldwide to jointly back up thematerials to which they subscribe, as well asWeb-based open access publications thatmight otherwise be lost. In the case of a natu-ral or technical disaster, LOCKSS memberscan recover their electronic journal accessfrom the backups of their peer institutions.Even if tightening budgets were to force thecancellation of an e-journal subscription, atleast the back issues have been safely stored!The MetaArchive is a private LOCKSS net-work (PLN) wherein the six geographicallydistributed partner institutions back up oneanother’s digital cultural heritage content in a“dark archive” not accessible to the public.(The Library of Congress serves as a seventhbackup, although we do not back up its con-tent.) Working together as a Cooperative, weset standards and policies for content selec-tion, collection-level metadata, and technicalspecifications, but each partner is entrusted tomake decisions about which formats to sub-mit, how a collection should be arranged, andPRESERVATION PERSPECTIVES: PRESERVING DIGITAL INFORMATIONBY RACHEL HOWARDEKSTROM LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLED E P A R T M E N T  K E N T U C K Y L I B R A R Y A S S O C I A T I O NKENTUCKY LIBRARIES • VOLUME 72 • NUMBER 3PRESERVATIONPERSPECTIVESCONTINUED17whether or not to include item-level metada-ta. We each operate servers running LOCKSSsoftware, and LOCKSS daemons which arecomputer programs running in the back-ground, to locate and harvest authorized digi-tal content from each partner’s sites. Daemonscontinuously compare the files on each serverand determine (by majority rule) whether afile has been damaged, restoring it fromanother server’s cache if necessary.This process guards against the “bit rot” of anindividual digital file, while the multipleservers distributed in different locations guardagainst the loss of content due to hardwarefailure or a natural disaster. Format, software,and hardware obsolescence remain inevitable,but we feel that by making a strategic com-mitment to digital preservation in theMetaArchive, we are prepared to cooperative-ly and proactively address migration and emu-lation when needed.The MetaArchive Cooperative is acceptingnew partners. Seehttps://www.metaarchive.org/join.html fordetails about joining the partnership.Rachel Howardrachel.howard@louisville.eduWORKS CITED1 Library of Congress. Digital Preservation. 9 June 2008 <http://www.digitalpreservation.gov>.2 MetaArchive Cooperative. 9 June 2008 <http://www.metaarchive.org>. 3 Stanford University. Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe (LOCKSS). 9 June 2008<http://www.lockss.org>.

Preserving digital information.

https://ir.library.louisville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&amp;context=faculty

Preserving digital information.

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