About MetaArchive: Collaboratively preserving our digital heritage

The MetaArchive Cooperative provides low-cost, high-impact preservation services to help ensure the long-term accessibility of the digital assets of universities, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions.

Why we need digital preservation. Today, more than 93% of the world’s information is produced as digital files, not print documents. How do we care for these new digital resources—from government websites to corporate emails and from scanned images to born-digital recordings? As evidenced by such catastrophic events as blackouts, fires, and hurricanes, as well as basic hardware and software failures, we need to act now to begin providing long-term digital preservation services for our digital history or we risk losing them altogether. MORE on Distributed Digital Preservation>

What we do. The MetaArchive Cooperative is building Trusted Digital Repositories using the open source LOCKSS software to provide long-term care for digital materials. The Cooperative was formed in 2004 out of our increasing concern that the digital items that define our culture and history might be forever lost due to natural disaster, human error, or sheer neglect.

Why we are unique. The Cooperative functions as a community initiative. Its collaborative networks are comprised of libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions that seek to cooperatively preserve their digital materials, not by outsourcing to other organizations, but by actively participating in the preservation of their own content.

How we do it. To preserve digital assets, the MetaArchive Cooperative uses a systemic, forward-looking technological approach called distributed digital preservation. Our member institutions identify collections that they want to preserve. Using a technical framework that is based on the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) software, these collections are then ingested into a geographically distributed network where they are stored on secure file servers in multiple locations. These servers do not merely back up the materials, but rather provide a dynamic means of constantly checking each file and providing repairs whenever necessary.

How can I learn more? Please contact our Program Manager for more information about our Cooperative and the services we offer.