LOC: New preservation blog launched

The Library of Congress digital preservation program is now part of the blogosphere, according to an LOC announcement today.

Part of the potential audience for the new blog are genealogists and family history researchers:

"The audience for us to interact with is potentially vast, as we are very interested in personal digital archiving: helping individuals and families preserve their digital photographs and other digital files that document their lives."

The new blog - The Signal - authored by digital initiatives manager Bill LeFurgy, who writes in the initial post that the official program name is the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, or NDIIPP (say N-DIP).

In 2000, Congress directed the LOC to undertake a national digital preservation program to address the large-scale challenge of digital preservation. Huge amounts of digital content were being created with no print equal, and that some content was needed to create records of the times we live in.

However, the amount of information was larger than what could made accessible. Because so much data could be lost, Congress created NDIIPP to lessen that risk.

Over the last 10 years we have built a national network of collaborative partnerships to help preserve important digital content, build new tools and develop best practices. The partnerships span different communities, including universities, federal and state government agencies and the commercial creative content industry.  This is a new approach. Libraries, archives and other memory institutions traditionally have worked separately to acquire and manage their collections. But digital is different—it calls for a new kind of capacity that is difficult for a single institution to build on its own. The only practicable way forward is collaboration: in building technical infrastructure, in sharing knowledge, in developing best practices and in assigning roles and responsibilities for stewarding digital collections.

Concerning preservation, he writes that technology is the easy part of digital preservation programs, but that social is the harder part. He talks about collaboration and the Internet, and mentions the LOC website digitalpreservation.gov which provides a rich collection of information and resources.

They have spoken to experts, list tools and services and shared global information. Future plans include looking at the spectrum of data, from large scientific databases to modest personal digital collections of documents. Interviews are planned with people from many fields.

Check out the new blog and provide feedback.