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General note: This page provides text of a PG publication that could readily be presented on the Web. The text is as submitted for publication (in machine-readable form) so some revisions by editors, or by me in proof, may not be reflected here. Footnotes may be given fully, or only at the end with unnumbered explicit markers in the text, or not at all. Please consult the published version and use that version in formal citations, as the text here may slightly differ.
Peter S. Graham
University Librarian, Syracuse University
This chapter deals with the issues surrounding preservation of digital information
as distinct from preservation of print materials through digitization. Though
terminology is not yet fixed, the former (our subject) is often referred to
as digital archiving, or preservation of digital information, to distinguish
it from the latter, often known as digital preservation.
Our concern is with the preservation of digital information that takes place
within a digital library, for which the Digital Library Federation (DLF) has
provided the following definition:
Digital libraries are organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities.
Such a verbose, clumsy definition is necessary because of the constantly changing
technological and social environment surrounding traditional library activities.
The DLF quite rightly points out that other players may invoke one particular
concept from this list to call their project a digital library (e.g. the National
Science Foundation focus on data bases in their Digital Libraries project);
yet without the related concepts, the library service provided will be narrow
and insufficient,
The mission of libraries has long been to acquire information, organize it,
make it available and preserve it. This has been their significant, distinctive
and successful role with print and other artifactual materials for the past
several hundred years. The mission has not changed in the digital environment,
but the inflated DLF definition is presently necessary to make clear to other
publics what we believe a digital library should be about.
Most libraries are now trying to provide an ever-increasing volume of scholarly
electronic information to their clienteles. Research libraries have taken on
the provision, organization and preservation of information with the same long-term
commitment made for print materials. It is an expensive, uncharted and difficult
task.
Until the long-term commitments are undertaken, many current digital proposals
will have only temporary effects. Cataloging of networked resources will necessarily
remain tentative until the objects being cataloged have a permanent network
presence, whether at fixed or virtual locations. Otherwise the cataloging that
points to them will itself have an ephemeral quality. (Cataloging for some transitory
electronic materials will always be necessary.) Similarly, the expensive products
of recent valuable digitizing demonstration projects, from microfilm to digital
form and vice versa, will be at risk after only a few years if tools and commitments
are not in place for the preservation of what has been achieved.
Most important, the ability of the scholarly community to give serious weight
to electronic information depends upon its trust in such information being dependably
available, with authenticity and integrity maintained. Changes in scholarly
publishing that might alleviate the serials crisis, for example, are (in North
America) bound up with the prestige of electronic journals in the academic tenure
process. The ability of the academy to count on long-term, secure existence
of electronic scholarly work will be an important determinant of the success
of academic electronic publishing. Libraries and universities have a stake in
helping electronic publishing to succeed, and therefore have an interest in
establishing secure, persistent and authoritative digital research libraries.
Users' needs will continue to be what they long have been. Users will want information
reliably locatable, so that when they go there (whether personally or on the
net) they can expect to find what they're looking for. Users will expect information
to be available that was placed in the library's care a long time ago; and they
will expect that the integrity of the information they get from the library
will be assured.
The requirements of digital technologies will change the way most librarians
work throughout research libraries. As it happens, professional librarians are
uniquely qualified to take up the technological challenge. But if we do not,
we will contribute to the stagnation of our own profession as well as fail in
our professional responsibility to civilization.
"Preservation" in libraries has until now been a matter of preserving
the artifact which provides the work inherent in it, thereby preserving the
work itself. Electronic documents, by contrast, force our preservation considerations
to divide into two: the preservation of the objects, as before, but also the
preservation of the information contained in those objects and which is now
so easily separable from them.
Barry Neavill deserves credit for writing presciently 15 years ago that no one
had yet "addressed the issue of the long-term survival of information.
. . . The survival of information in an electronic environment becomes an intellectual
and technological problem in its own right." If we want to assure permanence
of the intellectual record that is published electronically, he said, then it
will be necessary consciously to design and build the required mechanisms within
electronic systems. We are still in need of those mechanisms.
This chapter sets out some of the major issues in providing these user needs.
In fact, the primary requirement for a digital research library is that from
the start it be committed to organizing, storing and providing electronic information
for periods of time longer than human lives. Implementation of a digital research
library will require that specific tasks be accomplished and that several commitments
be undertaken. In what follows the tasks are given the most space, yet as technical
problems they probably are the easiest to solve. The institutional commitments
described in the following section will be much more difficult to achieve.
Preservation of electronic information needs to be looked at as comprising
three distinct tasks: medium preservation, technology preservation and intellectual
preservation. What is new about preservation in the digital environment is that
digital information must now be dealt with separately from its medium. A crude
analogy might be to place a book on a closet shelf and close the door for 500
years. At the end of that time, broadly speaking, one can open the door and
read that book. With an electronic resource we don't have that confidence even
after ten years: the device on which it is recorded may deteriorate, the technology
for its use is liable to obsolescence, and the contents may easily and invisibly
have been changed.
Medium preservation: Over the years the recording medium of tapes flakes off
its support, or the support itself gets brittle. CD-ROMs are still not considered
to have a dependable life of over 15 years, for if air enters through the plastic
cover the metal substrate quickly corrodes. Aside from proper environmental
and handling controls, the solution has been to "refresh" the information,
that is, to copy it from the potentially deteriorating medium to another, fresher
medium of the same or a similar kind. Except for device-dependent formatting,
the information itself is not changed in any way detectable by the user or its
application program.
Technology preservation: The preservation of the medium on which the bits and
bytes of electronic information are recorded is an important concern. But such
solutions will inevitably be short-term, and will not in themselves be the means
of preserving information over long periods of time. Michael Lesk in 1994 urged
that the greatest attention should instead be directed to the obsolescence of
technologies rather than simply of the media .
Lesk describes the rapid changes in the means of recording, in the storage formats,
and in the software that allows electronic information to be of use. Urging
what might be called technology preservation he asserts that for digital data,
"preservation means copying, not physical preservation." That is,
the preservation of electronic information into the indefinite future requires
its being "migrated" from old to new technologies as they become available
and as the old technologies cease being supported by vendors and the user community.
It is becoming clear that information migration, or technological preservation,
is the most problematic of the digital archiving challenges. Some of the evident
technical problems are how to assure forward compatibility of information files
within subsequently-developed application programs, given the short life-span
of program versions and of their supporting corporate creators. The logistical
question is posed: should information be migrated forward in time as new programs
supersede old, or should information only be migrated forward to a new program
when it is specifically needed? Is it necessary to preserve the technology that
supports all details of the target information (e.g. formatting of text) or
only its essentials--and what, of course, is the "essential" part?
Jeff Rothenberg and Clifford Lynch have written intelligently about these problems.
Rothenberg in 1998 discussed the strategy of "emulating" the software
environment of a digital object.. Lynch has used the analogy of textual editions,
and film versions of books, to suggest that the goal of perfect information
migration may not need fully to be achieved in order to satisfy future needs.
Intellectual preservation: Intellectual preservation addresses the integrity
and authenticity of the information as originally recorded. Preservation of
the media and of the software technologies will serve only part of the need
if the information content has been corrupted from its original form, whether
by accident or design. The need for intellectual preservation arises because
the great asset of digital information is also its great liability: the ease
with which an identical copy can be quickly and flawlessly made is paralleled
by the ease with which a change may undetectably be made.
Clifford Lynch has noted that
It is very easy to replace an electronic dataset with an updated copy, and...the replacement can have wide-reaching effects. The processes of authorship...produce different versions which in an electronic environment can easily go into broad circulation; if each draft is not carefully labeled and dated it is difficult to tell which draft one is looking at, or whether one has the "final" version of a work.
Professor D.F. McKenzie, in his 1992 Centenary Lecture for The Bibliographical
Society (London), wrote in urging a new direction for the Society that
It's the durability of those textual forms [books] that ultimately secures the continuing future of our past; it's the evanescence of the new ones that poses the most critical problem for bibliography and any further history dependent upon its scholarship.... As the late Northrop Frye said, "Society, like the individual, becomes senile in proportion as it loses its continuous memory," and [electronic] texts are now part of that memory, significant products of our civilisation.... [There is] a new urgency with the arrival of computer-generated texts. The demands made...by the evolution of texts in such forms, the speed with which versions are displaced one by another, and the question of their authority, are no less compelling than those we accept for printed books.
The problem may be put in the form of several questions that confront the user
of any electronic document (whether it is text, hypertext, audio, graphic, numeric
or multimedia information):
We properly take for granted the fixity of text in the print world. The printed
journal article I examine because of your footnote is the same text that you
read. Therefore we have confidence that our discussion is based upon a common
foundation. With electronic texts we no longer have that confidence.
There are three possibilities for change in electronic texts that confront us
with the need for intellectual preservation techniques:
Note that backup is not the issue or the solution. In question is how we know what we have (or don't have).
A document can sometimes be damaged accidentally, perhaps by data loss during
transfer or through inadvertent mistakes in manipulation; for example, data
may be corrupted in being sent over a network or between disks and memory on
a computer. This no longer happens often, but it is possible. More frequent
is the loss of sections of a document, or a whole version of a document, due
to accidents in updating.
There are at least two possibilities for intended change that is well-meant.
New versions and drafts are familiar to us from dealing with authorial texts,
for example, or from working with successive book editions, legislative bills,
or revisions of working papers. It is desirable to keep track bibliographically
of the distinction between one version and another. Readers are accustomed to
visual cues to indicate when a version is different. In addition to explicit
numbering one may observe the page format, the typography, the producer's name,
the binding, the paper itself. These cues are not available or dependable for
distinguishing electronic versions.
Structural updates, changes that are inherent in the document, also cause changes
in information content. A dynamic data base by its nature is frequently updated:
Books in Print, for example, or architectural drawings, or elements of the human
genome project, or today’s New York Times on the web. How may one identify
a given snapshot and authenticate it as representing a certain time?
The third kind of change that can occur is intentional change for fraudulent
reasons. The change might be of one's own work, to cover one's tracks or change
evidence for a variety of reasons, or it might be damage to the work of another.
In an electronic future the opportunities for revision of history will be multiplied.
An unscrupulous researcher could change experimental data without a trace. A
financial dealer might wish to cover tracks to hide improper business, or a
political figure might wish to hide or modify inconvenient earlier views. Consider
the consequences if political opponents could modify their own past correspondence
without detection. Then consider the case if each of them could modify the other's
correspondence without detection. Society, as well as each opponent, needs a
defense against such cases.
The need is to fix, or authenticate, a document so that a user can be sure of
the unaltered text when it is needed. Such a technique must be easy to use so
that it does not impede creation or access. It must also provide generality,
flexibility, openness where possible but document security where desired, low
cost, and -- most of all -- functionality over long periods of time on the human
scale.
Digital time-stamping and various forms of digital signatures are among solutions
available for the electronically novel problem of intellectual preservation.
There are likely to be others, each with their own assets and liabilities. The
preservation community must keep aware of potential solutions and urge implementation
of ones most broadly suitable; most of all, preservationists must be aware that
the problem exists and requires a solution beyond the important preservation
of the media and the technologies.
Much of what has been described so far is merely technical, so to speak, and
the outlines of solutions are emerging even if the details remain to be worked
out (setting aside here the non-trivial matters of cost). More difficult will
be the social compacts, that is, the agreements on standards, intellectual property
and access modes. But most difficult of all to achieve, if electronic preservation
and access are to be accomplished on any significant scale, will be the long
term commitments to these goals by institutions. Nothing makes clearer that
a library is an organization, rather than a building or a collection, than the
requirement for institutional commitment for electronic information to have
more than a fleeting existence.
The organization of libraries is already changing as electronic information increasingly becomes part of their charge. Most research libraries have had substantial systems departments which maintain infrastructures while the librarians take on more and more digital information responsibilities. Some libraries locate the responsibility for electronic information distinctly from that for print. Most libraries are coming to see the forms as inseparable and include digital responsibilities along with artifactual responsibilities in assignments for collection development, cataloging and public service.
Shortly we will see the permanent assignment of staff responsibility for the
long term maintenance of electronic information within a library. There is no
obvious artifactual parallel for this responsibility: for print it is now shared
by circulation, stack maintenance, preservation and physical plant departments.
Nor are there present parallels in academic computing centers, where staffs
typically focus on technological advance and availability, leaving data to the
users. The electronic preservation responsibility will be focused as it will
require technical expertise likely to be located in a single functional area.
It is unlikely that this functional area will be what we used to call the library's
systems department. As libraries move more into the electronic environment the
historic tripartite division of libraries into public services, technical services
and collection development continues functionally but in more fluid arrangements.
In addition, the need for consortial activity has become evident both for provision
and preservation of digital information. People who combine bibliographic understanding,
problem-solving abilities, negotiating skills and process orientation will be
needed throughout libraries; such staff will take on the demanding new technical,
collection and service responsibilities for long-term support of digital collections.
The permanent existence of a digital research library will require assured continuity in operational funding. Almost any other library activity can survive a funding hiatus of a year or more. Acquisitions, building maintenance, and preservation can be suspended, or an entire staff can be dispersed and a library shut down for several years, and the artifactual collections will more or less survive. But digital collections, like the online catalog, require continual maintenance if they are to survive more than a very brief interruption of power, environmental control, backup, migration and related technical care.
Online catalog maintenance costs have reached a rough steady state, and the
capital costs for new OPACs are decreasing relative to the capabilities provided.
The catalog size will continue to increase, but catalog records are small relative
to the information to which they refer. Digital collections, however, as a proportion
of the library's supply of information, will grow for the foreseeable future,
and the quantity of information requiring care will become considerable (and
much larger than the catalog). Unit costs of storage are likely to continue
falling for some time, which may make the financial burden manageable. (Staffing
costs are not expected to increase, only because most libraries now recognize
that overall staff growth for any reason will not be allowed for some time;
reassignments, however, are likely.)
Long term funding will be required to assure long term care. Libraries and their
parent institutions will need to develop new fiscal tools and use familiar fiscal
tools for new purposes. Public institutions, usually constrained to annual funding,
will have particular difficulties, but existing procedures for capital or plant
funding may provide precedents. One familiar technique is the endowment. It
has been difficult to obtain private funding for endowments of concepts and
services rather than books and mortar, but it is possible. Institutions might
also build endowments out of operating funds over periods of time
.
Some revenue streams associated with digital research libraries may be practical.
Consortial arrangements may allow for lease or purchase of shares in a digital
collection. Shorter-term access might be provided to other institutions on a
usage basis. Access could be sold to certain classes of users, e.g. businesses,
non-local clienteles, or specific information projects. New relations with publishers,
presently difficult to perceive through the miasmic fog rising from intellectual
property, might provide income for storage of electronically published materials
during the copyright lifetime in which publishers collect usage fees. With commitment
and imagination long term fiscal tools will be found.
All these are instrumental means of accomplishing the greatest requirement, that of conscious, planned institutional commitment to preserve that part of human culture which will flower in electronic form. While museums preserve artifacts, often beautiful, that embody information, libraries preserve information that -- until now -- has been embedded in artifacts (only occasionally of aesthetic interest in themselves). The advent of electronic information will accentuate the difference between these roles as libraries take the responsibility for the preservation of information in non-artifactual forms.
For the past century most research libraries have been associated with universities,
and this connection seems likely to continue in the immediate future. Whatever
the governance structure, an institution wishing to benefit from electronic
information will have to make a conscious commitment to providing resources.
Michael Buckland, of the University of California at Berkeley, has distinguished
between a library's role and its mission. Where the role of a library is to
facilitate access to information, its mission is to support the mission of its
parent institution. One can extend this to understand that if a university wishes
to continue gaining support for its mission from its library, it will have to
make commitments to the library's role. In the electronic environment, this
means new longstanding financial commitments which the library and university
together must identify and accomplish.
The commitment will have to be clearly and publicly made if scholars and other
libraries are to have confidence that a given digital collection is indeed likely
to exist for the long term. It is essential that guidelines or standards be
established defining what is meant by a long term commitment, and defining what
electronic repositories of data can qualify to be called a digital research
library. Just as donors of books, manuscripts and archives look for demonstration
of long term care and commitment, so too will scholars and publishers as they
create digital information which requires a home.
Describing current activities in digital archiving is presently best done by describing efforts undertaken by various national groups. This approach has the advantage of emphasizing the importance of consortial activity. As 1999 began, progress in digital archiving was strikingly international, and it was unevenly distributed around the globe.
Australia:
Work in Australia originated in 1993 on an explicitly national basis, with funding
both from the government and from the national library. It can be described
as a top-down approach, aiming first at principles and goals before proceeding
to implementation. PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) is headed
by an officer of the National Library of Australia, has an office and a budget
and has developed statements of vision, goals and objectives. PADI maintains
strong links between the library and archive communities. Its Statement of Principles
on Preservation of Australian Digital Objects reflects an early achievement
of national consensus. It has been followed by reports attempting to deal with
location of responsibilities, definitions of how digital information is to be
preserved, and the likely costs over time of digital archiving.
United Kingdom:
The Follett Commission of 1993 stimulated electronic library ("eLib")
activity on a broad front in the UK, supported by millions of pounds annually
and managed by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher
Education Funding Councils. After several national workshops on digital archiving,
in 1997 JISC inaugurated a specific program through CEDARS (CURL Exemplars in
Digital Archives, where CURL is the Council of University Research Libraries
of the UK). The present author is a member of this project’s advisory board.
The CEDARS participants comprise Cambridge, Leeds and Oxford Universities.
The main deliverables of the project will be recommendations and guidelines
as well as practical, robust and scalable models for establishing distributed
digital archives. It is expected that the outcomes of CEDARS will influence
the development of legislation for legal deposit of electronic materials and
feed directly into the emerging national strategy for digital preservation currently
being developed through the National Preservation Office of the British Library.
(Russell, 1998)
Another JISC-funded eLib project is the Arts and Humanities Data Service, which
has responded to specific requests of JISC’s Digital Archiving Working
Party by developing strategic policy framework statements for creating and preserving
digital collections.
United States:
Activity in the United States contrasts with that of Australia and the UK in
that there seem to be several loci of activity which don’t seem to have
much relation to each other. Nor are any of them are very explicit as to what
they are about. First, it is important to note that the substantially-funded
NSF Digital Libraries projects have focused primarily on large data base construction
(round one, in the mid-1990s) and on social implications (round two, now under
way). Emphasis is always on "innovative applications"; archiving is
mentioned in passing, but so far not funded.
Digital Libraries Federation: The DLF has now been in existence for several
years, but remains opaque to external observers. A coalition of about 20 libraries,
it has developed some brief broad strategic outlines of proposed activity but
has been silent as to actual projects within member libraries. In early DLF
statements digital archiving was listed as one of three main priorities; more
recently it is an "other" priority, with pre-eminent place given to
user authentication and authorization matters. Don Waters, the primary author
of the important 1996 report from RLG and the Commission on Preservation and
Access, has been the DLF director since 1997.
Research Libraries Group (RLG): The ARCHES (Archival Server) project, begun
in 1996, is specifically intended by RLG to address digital archiving. In its
first instance it is intended both to support a specific repository and to create
a software environment that will make long-term archiving possible. Details
of the digital archival commitment being made by the project are unclear, and
in its beginnings the project appears to have been subordinated to the specific
content respository created for it on marriage and law in the 19th century.
OCLC: This largest library utility is well placed to create and provide archiving
services, for it has readily available both the financial and intellectual capital
to do so. In 1997 it committed to archiving e-journals on behalf of its members
subscribers and bravely included a commitment to technological migration. However
it has remained silent on details of how it intends to achieve this goal, and
has not yet had to come through with this commitment in any specific instance.
Also, it has included the statement that it will migrate digital objects "at
its discretion," presumably depending upon the degree of difficulty. Though
in practice perhaps such a statement is always implied, its unqualified emphasis
so early does not add to the confidence one wishes in such a project.
Canada:
The Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries began work in 1997, but to date
has shown little emphasis on digital archiving. On the other hand, many Canadian
libraries are members of USA consortia (e.g. OCLC and RLG) whom they may count
upon to act in their behalf.
The commonwealth tradition of national planning and initiative (in spite of
Thatcherism and similar antipodean free-market emphases) appears in strong contrast
to the fragmented, non-governmental activities in North America. It remains
to be seen which approach will generate the optimal and broadly exploited archiving
technologies that are needed. However one can wish from the outset that the
USA groups were more communicative about what they are doing, and in particular
that they would coordinate their efforts with one another; to date there is
little evidence that they do so.
But it is notable that regardless of where digital archiving investigation is
going on, it is in consortial activity. There is uniform recognition that digital
archiving is not a matter soluble by individual institutions, whether for collection
reasons or for technological reasons.
Why should librarians undertake the difficult job of digital preservation? Why bother with this troublesome task? The answer should be self-evident: it is what we librarians do. The paradigm of librarianship taught in library school is to acquire information, organize it, preserve it and make it available. This has been useful and instructive in dealing with print materials, and it continues to be useful and instructive as we consider digital information.
It is the preservation imperative that is particularly important for readers
of this volume. In research libraries, and not only in special collections,
the consideration of long periods of time is more important than in other library
fields. It is our particular responsibility to see that library materials are
preserved and organized for use not only by our generation but by succeeding
generations of scholars and students. No one else has this specific responsibility;
it is what we do. If we do not do it, no one else will do it.
Pessimistically speaking, it is possible that the job cannot be done. We may
be swimming against the tide. Sociologically, much of our society is obsessed
with the present and uncaring of the past and therefore of its records. Technologically
refined tools are now available which not only allow but encourage the quick
and easy modification of text, of pictures, and of sounds. It is becoming routine
to produce ad hoc versions of performances, and to produce technical reports
in tailored versions on demand. The technology that allows us to interact with
information is itself inhibiting us from preserving our interaction.
However, there is cause for optimism. In our house there are many mansions;
there will continue to be people who want history, who care about the human
record, and who will support our efforts to serve them. Some aspects of electronic
preservation are already being dealt with by other communities. The financial
and business community, for example, has a stake in authentication of electronic
communication. The business and computing communities in general are interested
in protecting against the undesired loss of data in the short term. The governmental
and business communities have an interest in the security of systems.
But there is no other professional group dealing with the combination of all
these issues -- authentication, security and protection -- as complicated by
the length of time in centuries that research librarians contemplate, and by
the need to provide organized access to what is preserved.
Some librarians may draw back from the apparent complexity of the technologies
that support electronic information. But these technologies should present no
difficulty to minds that can easily deal with corporate authorship and with
the acquisition of monographic continuations. Our ability to create and use
the MARC record is now adequate to the task of setting standards for electronic
preservation. Providing valid electronic authentication techniques is no more
intractable than designing holdings statements for works in multiple formats.
Many librarians are very aware of the technologies and increasingly aware of
how we need to manage it.
And it is managing that is necessary. There are technical people aplenty who
can grapple with the bits and bytes of these issues if librarians give them
proper direction. The need is for people to articulate the requirements for
the electronic preservation of the human record and to lead our profession in
making it happen. That is the professional requirement, and it is the professionals
reading this -- you -- who are the most capable of assuring that it does happen.
There is a kind of back-to-basics quality to our now confronting the electronic
environment: to grapple with the ephemerality of electronic information is to
answer the abstract question of why we are librarians.
Most of us know that we like books; readers of this volume are likely to appreciate
books as physical objects and to enjoy reading. But back to basics. Our social
value as librarians comes from our provision of information -- our locating
it, organizing it, and preserving it. Libraries, and technical services, will
change. The change will be affected by how well we propose to carry on professional
activities. If we continue to emphasize only the physical objects we know as
books, important as they are, then a museum role becomes increasingly likely
as we become marginalized from the real scholarly communication now going on
.
Alternatively, we can continue to emphasize our professional obligation to preserve
and make available the human record, regardless of its form. Then we can lay
claim to being a part of the very current affairs of our society and of our
universities. We can then lay very effective claim to the resources we need
to carry out this obligation; and finding ways to do that is also our professional
requirement.
Establishing a digital research library continues the research library role.
To do so should be considered as natural as acquiring the next book or cataloging
the next journal. Not to do so would be an abdication of that role. The tasks
call not so much on new knowledge nor on new techniques, but upon informed commitment;
that is, upon will. For librarians wondering what is to come of their profession
in the electronic age, here is their challenge.
Australia:
PADI: Preserving Access to Digital Information
<URL:http:www.nla.gov.au/padi>
United Kingdom:
British Library Research and Innovation Centre
Digital Library Research Programme
<URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/service/bl/>
eLib: Electronic Libraries Programme
<URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/>
CEDARS: CURL Exemplars in Digital Archiving
<URL:http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/>
Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS)
<URL:http://ahds.ac.uk/>
Canada:
Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries (CIDL):
<URL:http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/cidl/aboute.htm>
USA:
Digital Libraries II:
<URL:http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/>
National Digital Libraries Federation
<URL:http://www.clir.org/diglib/dlfhomepage.htm/>
OCLC Archiving Solution:
<URL:http://www.oclc.org/oclc/eco/archive.htm>
RLG ARCHES Project:
<URL:http://www.rlg.org/strat/projarch.html>
ADD-Ons 2/6/99 responding to Paul Banks of Feb. 4, 1999:
Author’s alterations:
1. change "respository" to "repository" (in RLG graf)
2. Under Current Activities, first sentence, delete redundant "currently"
3. Under United States, first sentence, change "there seem to be"
to "there are"