What Is Being Saved
A key objective of National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) has been to collect and preserve high-value at-risk digital content that will be useful to Congress and the nation. The reason we refer to this content as "high-risk" is that if it is not saved now it will likely become corrupted or lost forever. Unlike physical materials, which can remain in their current state for decades, even centuries, content stored in digital formats is easily altered or even lost.
Because not all information created digitally can be saved, NDIIPP projects are focusing on collecting and saving specific types of digital information that will be useful to today’s and tomorrow’s generations:
Geospatial data
Today’s maps are born digital and are rich with critical data. These maps can also change easily as new data overwrites old. NDIIPP is ensuring long-term access to geospatial information, which is information relating to the location of, and relationships between, geographical features -- a vital asset in the government’s management of land use, preparation for disaster relief, tracking national health and safety patterns and informing national security planning. Geospatial data produced by state and local government agencies is used in a wide range of public and private sector applications, such as Medicare and Medicaid, tax assessment, business planning, homeland security and environmental issues.
Learn about the work of NDIIPP partners North Carolina State University and the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Web sites
The Web represents an increasingly important record of the political and social events of our time. Much of the documentation of our daily lives, as well as public debate, has moved to this new digital landscape in which content appears and vanishes at incredible speed. NDIIPP has supported a number of projects focused on saving high-value at-risk Web content
Learn about the work of NDIIPP partners the California Digital Library and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Television
The very nature of broadcast distribution makes television one of the most at-risk forms of content. Noncommercial programming from both the United States and foreign countries has been of particular interest to NDIIPP. Examples include 8,000 hours per year of programming collected by one of our partners of foreign-language news programming from 30 countries, such as Egypt, Iran, Qatar (al-Jazeera), Russia, South Africa and public television programming, including selected content from "Frontline," "Religion and Ethics" and "Nature"; additional hours of "Frontline" and "Religion and Ethics" as well as "The Supreme Court" and "African-American Lives."
Learn about the work of NDIIPP partners the Public Broadcasting System and SCOLA.
Social science datasets
Vast stores of digital social science data have not been adequately preserved. These materials constitute a major toolset for future research about the people of the United States and the world, telling us much about American society and the American economy, and helping us to understand the environment from which future opinions and political choices will develop. Examples include regional and national polling data, international polls and social and economic surveys.
Learn about the work of NDIIPP partner the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.
E-Journals
Educational institutions make huge investments every year in journals that increasingly are published only in electronic form. While electronic journals offer many advantages, such as full-text searching, there is no guarantee that their content will remain available far into the future. The scale and complexity of the infrastructure and operation necessary to preserve core electronic scholarly literature exceeds that which can be supported by any individual library or institutional budget. New collaborative approaches for sharing the cost of long-term preservation and access to these materials is required.
Learn about the work of NDIIPP partners Portico and LOCKSS.
Historical materials
History is written from personal writings, business records, recorded interviews, newspapers and many other documents that have survived over the years. The history of the digital age will be written from what can be saved now. Unfortunately, much of the early history of the Web is lost forever.
Learn about the work of NDIIPP partners Emory University and the University of Maryland.
