Monday, February 17, 2003

Library of Congress Aims to Preserve Intellectual Materials Existing in Digital Formats By SCOTT CARLSON Washington The Library of Congress will begin a program to preserve intellectual materials that exist in digital formats, library officials announced on Friday. Such materials include music and pictures on CD's, literature and journalism in the form of e-books, and online scholarly publications. The program will find the best strategies for selecting worthy digital work, study the technical and intellectual-property issues involved in preserving it, and begin setting up a preservation system. Laura E. Campbell, the library's associate librarian for strategic initiatives, said the program's leaders hoped to attract partners to donate intellectual materials and money, as well as help design the preservation system. "Part of the overall vision is to create a network of institutions to collect and preserve content, as well as to develop a technical architecture -- a model, if you will, within which there will be defined roles and responsibilities," she said. Congress has set aside $100-million for the project, called the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. However, in appropriating the funds, Congress said it expected other entities to participate. Up to $75-million of the project's budget is to be matched with contributions from other federal agencies, the information-technology industry, content distributors, entertainment companies, and research institutions and libraries. "It is very much intended to be a coordinated and collaborative approach," Ms. Campbell said. "Because of the amount of digital material, we need to share this responsibility with others. No one institution can do this alone." Representatives of companies and organizations as diverse as Kodak, the American Institute of Architects, Elsevier Science, Random House, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and elite universities have already been involved in workshops, board meetings, and discussions about the project. Eileen G. Fenton, executive director of the Electronic Archiving Initiative at JSTOR, a database of journal articles, took part in one of those workshops a year ago. She said she did not know the specifics of the Library of Congress's program, so she could not comment on it, but she added that it would begin to address a vital issue. "The long-term preservation of the nation's digital assets is a big problem," she said. "Much of our cultural heritage is now in digital form, and finding a way to preserve that is an important challenge for our time." She lauded the library's plans to work with private industry, research institutions, and foundations. "Given the enormity of the challenge, it seems that there would have to be multiple partners working together to find a solution." Ms. Campbell said the program would almost certainly get more money in the future to keep up with the number of digital materials and to keep transferring them to new recording technologies. The $100-million is "a significant amount of money to get us started," but "an actual infrastructure for the project will be a continuing process because technology is going to change," she said. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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