Chronopolis — Digital Preservation Across Space & Time
Digital preservation is a general term for a set of services with one goal: keeping your data safe so that it can be accessed in the future. Beyond the life of a grant or a research project, you need to ensure that your data is available for future generations. Ironically, digital data is significantly more transient than traditional information sources such as books, photos, which can easily survive for years, decades or even centuries. Without active management, data decay and disappear at an alarming rate.
Spanning academic institutions and disciplines, the Chronopolis digital preservation network provides services for the long-term preservation and curation of America's digital holdings. Because of the ephemeral nature of digital information, it is critical to organize and preserve the digital assets that represent society's intellectual capital—the core seeds of knowledge that are the basis of future research and education.
Chronopolis in the News
UC San Diego Library and Texas Digital Library Collaborate to Transform Digital Preservation Possibilities for Sensitive Data
The UC San Diego Library is embarking on a new effort with the Texas Digital Library (TDL) to co-create a blueprint for the first nationally Distributed Digital Preservation (DDP) service for private and sensitive data. This initiative was recently awarded a one-year, $87,384 grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Read more.
UC San Diego Library Receives Mellon Grant to Develop Approaches to Preserving Digital Repositories
A one-year, $161,000 grant from the New York City-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will fund a joint project to support the effective communication and exchange of data between local and national digital preservation repositories. The project — a collaboration between the UC San Diego Library, UC Santa Barbara, Emory University, Northwestern University and DuraSpace — will design tools that will enable libraries and archives to seamlessly deposit content into distributed digital preservation systems (DDPs), update that content over time and reliably restore content if needed.
The design work will leverage Chronopolis, a UC San Diego-led digital preservation platform, to enable digital repository platforms from around the world to simplify the process for creating preservation copies of their data. By addressing a current gap between digital preservation platforms and digital libraries this project will increase the reliability and sustainability of digital archives. Read more.
The Digital Preservation Network (DPN) to Cease Operations
The Digital Preservation Network (DPN) has announced plans to cease operations. The individual nodes that collectively provided preservation services to DPN seek to reassure the DPN membership as well as the larger academic and digital preservation communities that we remain confident about the future of digital preservation. Read the announcement on the DuraSpace blog.
Open for Comment: Digital Preservation Service Providers Declaration of Shared Values
The digital preservation landscape is one of a multitude of choices that vary widely in terms of purpose, scale, cost, and complexity. Over the past year, a group of collaborating organizations united in the commitment to digital preservation has come together to explore how we can better communicate with each other and assist members of the wider community as they negotiate this complicated landscape.
As an initial effort, the group drafted a Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values that is now being released for community comment. The document is available here and the comment period will be open until March 1st, 2018. In addition, we welcome suggestions from the community for next steps that would be beneficial as we work together. Comments, suggestions, and observations may be communicated to the group at comdigpres@googlegroups.com. We also welcome volunteer efforts to translate this declaration into additional languages.