List of digital preservation initiatives

Main article: Digital preservation

Digital information, and the digitisation of previously existing media, is already demonstrating its significant potential for loss. With such powerful new technologies, we also have the ability to lose information at a previously unsurpassed rate. Unlike paper, a digital archive often requires both "content" and "access tools" to survive intact, and still connected together. Avoiding such loss requires good practice to preserve information within a project, but it also requires projects themselves that are well-founded and have a robust future. This encourages the growth of high-profile projects, over small-scale ones. Some notable examples are:

• ARKive preserves film, video, audio and photographic media on endangered species.

• National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), run by The Library of Congress, is dedicated to ensuring that the digital information that conveys our history and heritage is available and accessible for generations to come. As a pioneer in the field of digital information, the Library has continued to provide digitized access to its vast collections.

• Portico, a not-for-profit organization originally launched by JSTOR in 2002, is a digital preservation service which provides "a permanent archive of electronic scholarly journals and books".^{[citation needed]} Additional support for Portico is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ithaka, and the US Library of Congress.

• FDsys (Federal Digital System) is a system being developed by the United States Government Printing Office to authenticate, preserve, and provide access to government information from all three branches of the Federal government.

• Elsevier Science digital archive. In 2002, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek became the official digital archive for 7 terabytes of Elsevier Science journals.

• LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), under the auspices of Stanford University, develops and supports open-source software for digital preservation based on a distributed network of preservation appliances running a sophisticated voting protocol. Originally designed to preserve scholarly journals, the LOCKSS technology is now being used to preserve electronic theses and dissertations, government documents, books, blogs, websites, image collections, etc. The LOCKSS Program also runs its own preservation network.
  • MetaArchive Project Six universities (Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Florida State University, Auburn University and the University of Louisville) and the Library of Congress are developing "a cooperative for the preservation of at-risk digital content [about] the culture and history of the American South" in a private LOCKSS network.^{[citation needed]}
  • Alabama Digital Preservation Network (ADPNet) In 2006, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded a two-year National Leadership Grant to the Network of Alabama Academic Libraries (NAAL) and seven Alabama institutions to build a low-cost distributed digital preservation network for the state. The resulting system, ADPNet, is a private LOCKSS network; its mission is to preserve digital content created by cultural heritage organizations in Alabama and to serve as a model for digital preservation networks in other states. The participating institutions are the Alabama Department of Archives & History, Auburn University, Spring Hill College, Troy University, the University of Alabama, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of North Alabama.
  • ASERL ETDs Eight universities of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (Florida State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, the University of Kentucky, the University of Miami, the University of Tennessee, Vanderbilt University and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) are preserving each other's collections of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in a private LOCKSS network.
  • GPO LOCKSS Pilot The Government Printing Office conducted a pilot program to "manage, disseminate, and preserve access to Web-based Federal Government e-journals that are within the scope of the FDLP and IES" (Federal Depository Library Program and International Exchange Service), using LOCKSS technology. Pilot participants included 18 universities, the German National Library, the United States National Agricultural Library and the Government Printing Office.
  • Alaska State Publications Program To continue complying with its obligations under Alaska state statutes to "make state publications freely available to Alaskans by distributing them to local depository libraries", the Alaska State Library is expanding its depository program to preserve Alaska State publications that are Web-only by making them accessible to LOCKSS collection.
  • 'CLOCKSS "Controlled LOCKSS") is "a not-for-profit community partnership among publishers and libraries that is developing a distributed, validated, comprehensive archive that preserves and ensures continuing access to electronic scholarly content" using a private LOCKSS network.^{[citation needed]} It mobilizes the resources of twelve large publishers (American Chemical Society, American Medical Association, American Physiological Society, Blackwell Publishing, Elsevier, Institute of Physics, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, SAGE Publications, Springer Science+Business Media, Taylor and Francis and John Wiley & Sons) and seven institutions (Indiana University, the New York Public Library, the OCLC, Rice University, Stanford University, the University of Virginia and the University of Edinburgh).

• New media art preservation. Arts organizations (including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, the New Museum affiliate Rhizome and the Franklin Furnace Archive, amongst others) have been collaborating on various initiatives in the research of New media art preservation. Such initiatives include the Variable Media Network and the Archiving the Avant Garde project.

• The National Digital Heritage Archive (NDHA) programme is a partnership between the National Library of New Zealand, Ex Libris Group and Sun Microsystems to develop 'Preservation' a digital archive and preservation management system. Established in 2004, the NDHA Programme is due to be completed in late 2009.

• The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art The Archive was founded in 2002 by Timothy Murray and was named after the pioneering critic of the commercialization of mass media, the late Professor Rose Goldsen of Cornell University. The Archive hosts international art work produced on CD-Rom, DVD-Rom, video, digital interfaces, and the internet. Its collection of supporting materials includes unpublished manuscripts and designs, catalogues, monographs, and resource guides to new media art. The curatorial vision emphasizes digital interfaces and artistic experimentation by international, independent artists. Designed as an experimental center of research and creativity, the Goldsen Archive includes materials by individual artists and collaborates on conceptual experimentation and archival strategies with international curatorial and fellowship projects.

• DSpace is an open source software that is available to anyone who has the World Wide Web. DSpace essentially takes data in multiple formats (text, video, audio, or data), distributes it over the web, indexes the data (for easy retrieval), and preserves the data over time. Posting data on DSpace is fairly simple, but it does require those who are posting it to have the copyright to the material or to have permission to post non-copyrighted data. The information entered into DSpace (title, author, publication information, and keywords) is called "Metadata." DSpace's main use for cataloging this "Metadata" is to preserve it over time.

• The National Archives of the United Kingdom have pioneered various initiatives in the field of digital preservation and use the Safety Deposit Box software from Tessella

• KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable) is a three-year project co-funded by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme. The overall aim of the project is to facilitate universal access to our cultural heritage by developing flexible tools for accessing, manipulating and storing a wide range of digital objects using emulation tools either to reproduce the original environment in which they were created or to enable those objects to be migrated accurately to another environment.

• The British Library is responsible for several programmes in the area of digital preservation.

• PLANETS (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) is a four-year project co-funded by the European Union under the Sixth Framework Programme to address core digital preservation challenges. The primary goal for Planets is to build practical services and tools to help ensure long-term access to our digital cultural and scientific assets.

• The Safety Deposit Box software from Tessella is being widely adopted by National Archives and has been selected by the National Archives in the UK, Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Estonia, Malaysia and Austria as well as FamilySearch and the Wellcome Collection. It was recently awarded the Queen's Awards for Enterprise in the UK.

• DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) is the EU project registered in Information Society Technologies (IST) priority funded under Sixth Framework Programme of EU. The project started in the April 2006 and will end in the March 2009. The project focuses on dissemination of the digital preservation issues to professionals as well as non-professionals, and on the coordination of digital preservation activities across Europe. In order to share information on current initiatives on digital preservation, the DPE project has set up a registry of research activities and projects and carried out a state of the art review on international Competence Centres for digital curation and preservation.

• PADI is a comprehensive archive of information on the topic of digital preservation from the National Library of Australia.

• The Preserve Games project was launched in 2008 by professor Megan Winget in participation with IMLS and the Center for American History at the University of Texas in order to help preserve the creation history of Massively multiplayer online game games. The project intended to preserve artifacts of the game creation process itself rather than the final game.

• The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is a UK-based non-profit limited company which seeks to secure the preservation of digital resources in the UK and internationally to secure the global digital memory and knowledge base.

• CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval) is a european project on Digital Preservation co-funded by the European Commission from 2006 to 2009, within the Sixth Framework Programme. CASPAR has based its information and architecture modelling on OAIS Reference Model (ISO:14721:2003) and has identified, defined and implemented Key Components for supporting digital preservation activities: packaging (SIP/AIP/DIP), archival storage, finding aids, knowledge management, notification of changes, data access and security, digital rights management, representation information tool and registry, authenticity, virtualisation. The specifications and implementations of those components are freely available in the Sourceforge "Digital Preservation Services" Community.

• SCAPE is a European project (part of FP7) that will enhance the state of the art of digital preservation in three ways: by developing infrastructure and tools for scalable preservation actions; by providing a framework for automated, quality-assured preservation workflows and by integrating these components with a policy-based preservation planning and watch system. The SCAPE consortium brings together experts from memory institutions, data centers, research labs, universities, and industrial firms in order to research and develop scalable preservation systems that can be practically deployed within the project lifetime. SCAPE is dedicated toward producing open source software solutions available to the entire digital preservation community. The project results will be curated and further exploited by the newly founded Open Planets Foundation. Project results will also be exploited by an SME and research institutions within the consortium catering to the preservation community and by two industrial IT partners.

• FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) is a digital file format used to store, transmit, and manipulate scientific and other images.