Digital Preservation Partners Meeting
The Collaborative Collection Development partners will have much to present and talk about during their meeting in San Diego this month. There, they will share recent news, ideas for the future and issues they have in common. The San Diego Supercomputer Center is hosting this semiannual meeting. SDSC is one of the recipients of a Library of Congress-National Science Foundation award for digital preservation research. Its project is called “Digital Preservation Lifecycle Management: Building a Demonstration Prototype for the Preservation of Large Scale Multimedia Collection.”
A full report on the NDIIPP meeting will appear in the next issue of this newsletter.
Additions to the NDIIPP Network
The NDIIPP network will soon grow to include many more members and projects. Early this year, the Library will announce partnerships in the Preserving Creative America and states initiatives. The new partnerships will bring representatives from the private sector and state governments into the NDIIPP fold.
The Birth of the Dot-Com Era
A current NDIIPP partner, the University of Maryland, which is leading a project called “The Birth of the Dot-Com Era,” won a recent court case in San Francisco. Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, together with theCenter for History and New Media at George Mason University; Gallivan, Gallivan and O’Melia LLC; Snyder, Miller, Orton Lawyers LLP; and the Internet Archive, is preserving at-risk digital materials from the American business culture during the early years of the commercialization of the Internet. The materials, collected through Web portals at www.businessplanarchive.org (external link) and www.dotcomarchive.org (external link) 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.
The Business Plan Archive (external link) has worked for years to preserve the digital records of failed law firm Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison. In August 2006, the United States Bankruptcy Court, Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, authorized the creation of a special "closed archive" allowing a large subset of records from the failed law firm to be preserved. Brobeck represented thousands of startups and high-tech investors during the Dot Com Era. The court approved a high-level set of principles that will now be translated into operating guidelines and procedures to govern the operation of the closed archive in the years to come. This closed archive will serve as a model of a trusted institutional repository.
See You in the Funny Papers
The word on digital preservation has gone mainstream, as evidenced by a recent “Cathy” comic strip, by creator Cathy Guisewite. On Oct. 1, 2006, the following strip ran (used with permission of Universal Press Syndicate).
NDIIPP 2005 Annual Review
Fiscal 2005 was a year of many successes for the program to preserve digital materials. The Library’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, which oversees NDIIPP and many of the other digital programs of the Library, has just issued its fiscal 2005 Annual Review. The publication provides an excellent overview of NDIIPP at its halfway point.
Read the Office of Strategic Initiatives fiscal 2005 annual review (PDF, 6.2MB)
