Library launches alliance to preserve digital objects

The Library of Congress is setting up a national organization for the preservation of digital objects, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance.

The alliance is a collaborative effort among federal agencies, non-profit and private sector organizations; the Library announced the alliance in an August 3 news release. The alliance is an outgrowth of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program that the library has administered since 2000.

"By joining, what you're doing is saying 'I want to work with other organizations,'" said William Lefurgy, the Library's digital initiative manager. "It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get funding. It's about working with other organizations, everybody's collective experts and capability," he added.

Preservation of digital objects, plagued as they are by inaccessibility through technological obsolesce, can be a challenging task.

Lefurgy said the Library has been working with vendors to come up with formatting standards that can withstand a test of time.

For example, a PDF document with embedded JavaScript might not be accessible after programming standards move onward. Digital preservationists would ask that the document be preserved in a self-contained format known as PDF/A.

"It's a flavor of PDF that has a number of bells and whistles removed," Lefurgy explained.

For more:
- read the August 3 press release announcing the National Digital Stewardship Alliance
- go to the NDSA homepage

Related Articles:
FOIA trends up and down
OMB tech plans face cuts in Senate
Bush White House emails omitted from archives