News Archive
August 2006
Last month, representatives of NDIIPP's collaborative collection development projects met in Washington to discuss their progress and to collaborate on solutions to common areas of interest. This was the fourth of the semiannual meetings the partners attended since they first received awards in September 2004. A full report of the July 19-20 proceedings will soon be available from this Web site.
On July 21, NDIIPP issued a request for expressions of interest in the Preserving Creative America project, which is seeking partners from the commercial content sector to work with NDIIPP as part of its digital preservation network of institutions collecting and preserving digital material. The deadline for submitting information is Sept. 22, 2006.
The request grows out of a strategy meeting held by the Library in Los Angeles last April in which NDIIPP gathered more than 50 private sector producers of digital content to assess their interest in, and plans for, the long-term preservation of their digital content. Participants in the meeting, which launched the Preserving Creative America project, discussed a range of issues pertaining to digital preservation and explored potential relationships between the Library of Congress and those engaged in or associated with the creation of digital content in the United States today. Additional information about the meeting is available.
On July 27, Laura Campbell, associate librarian for Strategic Initiatives, who is leading NDIIPP, testified before the House Committee on Administration on the future of NDIIPP. The complete hearing Webcast, in which Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and other Library officials also testified, is available from the committee's Web site. You can read Campbell's statement as well (Campbell's testimony appears third).
In a new NDIIPP partnership, the program is working with SCOLA to ensure that high-interest foreign news broadcasts such as those from Al-Jazeerah and from Pakistan, Russia and the Philippines are archived and available for future research.
SCOLA is a nonprofit educational corporation that receives and retransmits television programming of long-term research value from around the world in native languages. Under this cooperative agreement, a minimum of 3,750 hours of programming in digital form will be archived by SCOLA over a six-month period and made available to the Library of Congress and its researchers.
NDIIPP now boasts 67 partnerships under 28 agreements, and by the end of the year, more than 100 partners will have joined the preservation network.
As in the past, representatives from NDIIPP attended the American Library Association Annual Meeting, this time in New Orleans on June 24-26. While there, NDIIPP staff made presentations in the Library's exhibit booth on the digital preservation program and answered questions from interested attendees. The NDIIPP presentations have drawn ever-larger crowds, as ALA attendees are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of digital preservation to the work they do.
