December 12, 2023

Celebrating the MetaArchive Technical Team

MetaArchive is a distributed digital preservation system, relying on members to host caches, volunteer time and energy to committee work, and exchange knowledge within and outside of the Community. However, a common pain point felt by many digital preservationists is a lack of technical support dedicated to preservation infrastructure long-term. MetaArchive provides a low-barrier entry to digital preservation because we have robust technical support through our contracted staff members Bill Robbins, Kurt Nordstrom, and Chris Helms, and through LOCKSS Support Engineer Clay Miller.

MetaArchive has been lucky to have had dedicated staff members who have supported our infrastructure since 2008, and as our infrastructure shifts to LOCKSS and we transition our technical support to the LOCKSS Program team, we wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate and thank our Technical Team for their work. Their contributions have been substantial and essential to MetaArchive functionality and we cannot express our gratitude enough.

The Technical Team members have been integral to how MetaArchive functions, ensured smooth transitions, and provided quick IT support.  Some of their essential activities included cache management, Conspectus management, research and development support, Amazon Web Service (AWS) management, and bridging support between MetaArchive and LOCKSS.

Cache Management: Our members host the caches that create our distributed digital preservation network. The Technical Team leads the ongoing maintenance of caches and provides technical support to local IT teams and members. They oversee cache replacements and manage cache recovery during rare, but inevitable, cache failures and are key to getting the network performing optimally. The Technical Team is central to all cache management and we heavily rely on them on the operational side of the cache server and LOCKSS maintenance.

Conspectus: Conspectus is the MetaArchive’s web-based collection management tool and the first point of entry for ingest into the network. The Conspectus maintains the metadata and preservation status information of preserved (or to be preserved) collections of member institutions and offers an easy to use interface, so that members can create, update, and maintain their collections and the collection descriptions of their archives.  All members depend on  the Conspectus, and the Technical Team ensures that it is up and running and manages all debugging and technical support for it .

Supporting Research & Development: The MetaArchive community has been engaged in ongoing research and development to improve services for our members, many of which are supported. Recent projects include the SuperNode Pilot Project and evaluating our current LOCKSS infrastructure.

AWS Integration: MetaArchive integrated AWS EC2 Cloud storage in 2010 as a backup system in a cloud environment to serve as a single location for the cache manager, title database, and central plugin repository. Since then, as more members transition to using AWS S3 and EC2 for their organization’s storage solution, the Technical Team has facilitated the integration of more AWS-accessible features.

LOCKSS Support: As a Private LOCKSS Network, MetaArchive works collaboratively with LOCKSS technical support to maintain smooth integrations and cache support for MetaArchive members.

We also want to take the opportunity to highlight the individual work of the Technical Team to acknowledge the depth and importance of their expertise.

Bill Robbins has been at MetaArchive since 2008, working closely with Educopia leadership. His role began as a Systems Administrator for MetaArchive and has taken on additional areas of support as needed, particularly as our cache expert. Initially, his work focused on coordinating Archival Unit (AU) ingest into the MetaArchive repository. He has written documentation for the LOCKSS interface that is still used as the official guidance for the LOCKSS GUI. His role transitioned to Network Support on a part-time basis for the last few years and he rejoined the Technical Committee to assist with the LOCKSS 2.0 investigation. Bill has performed everything from writing shell scripts for server maintenance to presenting his work in collaboration with MetaArchive. He contributed to “Chapter 7: Cache and Network Administration for PLNs” in A Guide to Digital Preservation (2010) Edited by Katherine Skinner & Matt Schultz, presented at Designing Storage Architecture hosted by the Library of Congress in 2009 on MetaArchive & Cloud Computing, and joined the Technical Committee in our 2020 MetaArchive LOCKSS Evaluation.

Bill currently serves as the Lead System Engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

Kurt Nordstrom has been with MetaArchive since 2015 and is the expert on the MetaArchive user interface Conspectus. Conspectus is a central tool for the network and operations, allowing members to manage collection-level metadata and monitor preservation statuses. Kurt led the ongoing maintenance of the front and back ends of Conspectus. He has maintained Conspectus diligently, migrating it from Ruby to Django Python, serving as a backstop and administrator as needed, and perpetually debugging. 

Kurt currently serves as a Software Developer at Index Data.

Chris Helms has been with MetaArchive since 2012. He became the general Systems Administrator and led all AWS infrastructure initiatives, including provisioning AWS, server setup, writing shell scripts for the administrative server, and consultation. Recently, Chris implemented our new Private LOCKSS Network dashboard to stand it up in AWS and manage the keys for our ingest plugins in the network. Chris is the bridge between our Technical Team and the Transition Team during the MetaArchive’s transition to LOCKSS infrastructure and is the point person for facilitating that transition on the MetaArchive side.

Chris has been at the Georgia Tech Library in various IT roles and currently serves as the Manager of Network Services. 

Clay Miller has been key technical support for MetaArchive since 2011. As a Support Engineer for the LOCKSS Project at Stanford University, he has been integral in keeping MetaArchive up and running. He has made himself available to MetaArchive members for direct, one-on-one support for everything LOCKSS, such as cache-hosting configuration, cache server replacements, Linux upgrades on cache servers, AU rebalancing across cache server filesystems, cache recovery; ingest issues diagnosis, and locating the right documentation for any LOCKSS-related question. Clay will continue to be an ongoing resource for the MetaArchive.

Clay currently serves as a Support Engineer for LOCKSS at Stanford University.

 


November 3, 2023

Announcing the 2024 MetaArchive Leadership Team Candidates

The MetaArchive Cooperative is pleased to announce the candidates for the 2024 Leadership Team election. Details about each position can be found in our Governance Procedures.

Elections will be held from November 6th, 2023 to November 29th, 2023.

Elected Leadership Team members will take office on January 1st, 2024.

The voting representative for each Institutional and Collaborative member will receive a ballot via email on November 13th.


Reid Boehm

Research Data Systems Manager, Purdue University Libraries

Running for: Chair-Elect

Candidate Statement

Working as the Research data systems manager at Purdue University Libraries and managing Purdue University Research Repository is in many ways my dream job because it allows me to work with both the human and technical elements of research data stewardship and with a repository held in high regard within the research data management community. Every day I learn more from researchers, my colleagues, and in the process of developing and sustaining campus partnerships. My doctoral degree is in information science and ever since I’ve worked in academic libraries supporting researchers and working with research data repositories. My background is in research data management, curation, and repositories, starting with an internship at a NASA archive center and a post-doc at Notre Dame Libraries. I enjoy collaborative research on data services and repository related issues. In the past year and a half, since coming to Purdue and getting involved with the collaborative as a member and in working with the Community Research Task Force I am learning multitudes in the realm of preservation, and in a broader extent how a distributed network made up of diverse institutions can sustain and support each other and their system in the face of changes and challenges. I enjoy working with the collaborative, and would like to contribute as a member of leadership to be a part of the effort to support and sustain a valuable network that plays a major role for so many in this field.

Alex Kinnaman

Digital Preservation Coordinator, Virginia Tech

Running for: Treasurer

Candidate Statement

My work at Virginia Tech is largely policy writing, collaborating on developing and implementing preservation workflows, and consulting with my colleagues on preservation needs. My research interests are in repository certification metrics, digital preservation documentation, and the preservation of 3D objects and Digital Humanities projects.

I am running for the Treasurer position on the Leadership Team. I have served as the MetaArchive Treasurer for almost two years as we investigated changes to our financial health and transitioned our budget structure. I believe that given our current time of transition and changing budget priorities, I can provide context and recent historical knowledge to the way our budget is managed. I also serve as co-chair for the Outreach & Membership Services Committee, and have been with the Outreach folks since 2020, and previously served at the Leadership Team Secretary. I look forward to the opportunity to serve and to helping support the forward-movement of MetaArchive. Thank you for your time and consideration.


Hannah Pryor

Archivist for University Records and Records Manager, University of Louisville

Running for: Secretary

Candidate Statement

Hannah Pryor seeks reelection to the role of the MetaArchive Leadership Team’s Secretary. She is an archives and records management professional with 8+ years of experience in state government and higher education. She currently works at the University of Louisville as their Archivist for University Records and Records Manager and often manages born-digital and digitized university records. She is also a member of the Outreach and Membership Services Committee.


October 10, 2023

MetaArchive Concludes Project Mycelium

In February 2022, MetaArchive announced a research and development project to create a next-generation distributed digital preservation solution that later became known as Project Mycelium. The project was a multi-phase effort to leverage commercial-sector infrastructure advancements to simplify digital preservation and increase sustainability. Phase 1 focused on documenting requirements and conceptualizing the design, it was completed in Fall 2022.

MetaArchive worked with Keeper Technology to complete Phase 1 activities that include an environmental scan, prioritization and justification of digital preservation storage criteria, user surveys and interviews, and a design document for a next-generation digital preservation architecture. We used multiple strategies to seek feedback from the digital preservation community including posting to digital preservation related mailing lists, presenting a paper at iPRES 2022, and a presentation at Library of Congress Designing Storage Architectures 2023; each time a link to the design document was shared, encouraging people add comments and suggestions. Pricing estimates for initial development and ongoing maintenance showed that MetaArchive would need to find partners to continue to phases 2 (proof-of-concept) and 3 (production service).

At the same time that we engaged the community on our design document, MetaArchive launched the Community Research Task Force to assess the organization’s financial health, engage in contingency planning, and present options to the membership for remediating technical debt. While the Task Force is continuing some of its work, a result of the process was a decision to strengthen our relationship with LOCKSS and contract with them to perform essential technical operations, including the creation of an anchor node that will hold a copy of all AUs in the network. 

This change was needed to maintain the viability of our network in the short- and medium-terms. It does not limit MetaArchive’s ability to resume technical operations in the future or to pursue other preservation technologies. However, it does mean that now is not the right time for us to continue working on Project Mycelium. We had a lot of fun and learned much during the process and it helped us to solidify our shared understanding and formed a consensus around digital preservation requirements. We hope the artifacts from this project may be helpful to other digital preservation networks and community members. Thank you to everyone who read or commented on the design document, attended our conference sessions, or participated in the process.


October 6, 2023

MetaArchive Fall Update: New Opportunities, New Challenges

The MetaArchive Cooperative is excited to announce that we are partnering with the LOCKSS Program at Stanford University to improve our central administrative infrastructure through increased engagement with the LOCKSS community. This decision was reached through the work of the MetaArchive Community Research Task Force,open communication with the LOCKSS Program team, and an informed MetaArchive community vote. The Cooperative will continue to operate as an Educopia Institute community while contracting out technical support to the LOCKSS Program. 

We are grateful to the LOCKSS Program team for their generosity, openness, and active collaboration during this transition and look forward to working closely with them to improve the MetaArchive Collaborative.

Community Research Task Force

As a member-owned, distributed digital preservation network, MetaArchive is continuously investigating strategies to improve technical capabilities, membership support, and community-based decision-making all while remaining grounded in our Mission, Vision, and Values Statement. To fulfill this mission, the MetaArchive Community Research Task Force spent the first and second quarter of 2023 addressing the cooperative’s  existing technical debt, improving contingency planning capabilities, and lowering the barrier of entry for participation. For more detailed information on the work of the task force, see the June 7, 2023 blog post, “MetaArchive’s Community Research Task Force is Planning for the Future of the Community.”

Reviewing the current status and further sustainability of the cooperative required a critical eye and a commitment to transparency. Specifically, the task force reviewed all aspects of the cooperative which needed improvement. The approach was one of hard realism rather than aspiration, encouraging the community to assess its known pain points, both in the immediate and in the long-term. Initially, the task force focused on improving contingency planning, developing two new procedural governance documents, the MetaArchive Contingency Plan for Sunsetting and the MetaArchive Operating Reserve policy, as well as the creation of a prospective operations budget. With contingency infrastructure in place, strategies to achieve the prospective operations budget resulted in several paths for the collaborative to move forward. 

The task force for the second quarter of 2023 brought three proposals to the community for consideration:

  1. Partnership with the LOCKSS Program, to continue our current technical infrastructure with increased technical support and less overhead.
  2. Staying independent and focusing on fundraising to hire additional staff for increased support.
  3. Initiate sunset in January 2024 which would provide the membership, and the digital preservation community, a generous transition period.

These proposals considered the financial sustainability of the Cooperative, the obstacles and benefits each option provided the membership and the digital preservation community, and areas of possible development for the Cooperative. The proposals were reviewed by the Leadership Team, presented to the Cooperative prior to the annual member meeting for discussion, and provided  a communication plan, with feedback opportunities, via email. The Leadership Team released a ballot to the community in July 2023 and the final decision was option 1, partnership with the LOCKSS Program.  

Transition & Impact

MetaArchive has been using the LOCKSS digital preservation software since its founding in 2004, which makes transitioning technical support to the LOCKSS Program mutually beneficial. During the planning process, the LOCKSS Program team generously proposed a number of modular support scenarios for partnering with MetaArchive. These scenarios are designed with the opportunity to be decoupled in the future if more independence is desirable and achievable. The LOCKSS Program’s Support team is well-positioned to advise MetaArchive on mitigating risk from node turnover and provide assistance as MetaArchive addresses existing technical debt and migrates to LOCKSS 2.0. LOCKSS Program staff will be able to provide user support during business hours, increasing service responsiveness and reliability. As one of the longest-running LOCKSS networks, MetaArchive’s experiences will help the LOCKSS user community better understand the support needs of mature digital preservation collaboratives  that rely on member contributions and decentralized infrastructure. 

The Cooperative is invested in our values and chose a path forward that is consistent with our collaborative, community-focused mission. MetaArchive and its members will continue to be active contributors to the global community of open-source preservation tools and their users, not passive consumers of  proprietary preservation products. As structured, the partnership with the LOCKSS Program effectively brings MetaArchive closer to needed support and services, and increases communication between the LOCKSS Program and the network about technical needs that might be shared with the rest of the LOCKSS user community. The LOCKSS Program has always had a stake in MetaArchive’s success and sustainability. This partnership is an affirmation of the values both entities hold in common, as well as the ways in which effective digital preservation demands adaptation to changing technology and institutional capacities over the long term. A transition team composed of members from the LOCKSS Program team, MetaArchive Leadership Team and Technical Committee, and Educopia was formed in August 2023. Their charge is to document and facilitate the transition of MetaArchive systems and technical support services to the LOCKSS Program team at Stanford by November 2023. 

In the short term, the partnership with the LOCKSS Program provides immediate cost savings that allows the Cooperative more breathing room to develop sustainability plans and pursue external funding. There is also an immediate increase in technical and software implementation support during regular business hours. Looking further out, the technical support transition frees up staff and volunteers to focus on community management and governance support, including strategies for external funding. The long-term impact is a more sustainable, robust, and continuously member-driven distributed digital preservation community with a greater capacity to serve its members and adapt to the changes inherent in the digital humanities.


June 7, 2023

MetaArchive’s Community Research Task Force is Planning for the Future of the Community

The MetaArchive Cooperative broke ground in community-based digital preservation when it was founded in 2004. Over its first decade, it grew to be one of the first international, member-owned, distributed digital preservation networks. Other digital preservation organizations, particularly in the community of LOCKSS networks, were able to learn from MetaArchive and refine on its early implementations of LOCKSS and community governance model.

Now at the end of its second decade, MetaArchive is still dedicated to community-driven digital preservation. MetaArchive offers unique value to its members, as one of the only examples of an independent member-owned cooperative that supports decentralized, risk-mitigating digital preservation storage. As a cooperative, MetaArchive thrives on the investments that its members make to the organization. These investments, however, have become increasingly difficult for MetaArchive members to sustain over time. As IT infrastructure in academia and cultural heritage organizations is overwhelmingly outsourced to the cloud, maintaining an on-premise node for a network like MetaArchive starts to be seen as a “boutique” service that is untenable for some of our members. This shifting IT landscape has also made it difficult for current and prospective members to advocate internally for membership in an organization like MetaArchive, because the value of distributed, decentralized digital preservation storage may not be well-understood. These shifts obscure the fact that MetaArchive, as a long-standing consortial effort between academic and cultural heritage organizations, is uniquely positioned to provide responsible stewardship for digital materials and advance digital preservation work across the field.

The digital stewardship commitments made by MetaArchive operate on an inherently longer timescale and look to a fundamentally different set of impact measures than other kinds of digital work. Knowing this helps us define our success by our ability to build capacity for our collective action initiatives, anticipate change, adapt our ways of working, and think strategically about resourcing. This definition of success for community-driven digital preservation guides the current work of the Community Research Task Force. The task force’s primary objective is to research, document, and present information about the current state of the community, and to make an evidence-based recommendation to broader membership regarding MetaArchive’s strategic directions.

In this current change process, MetaArchive is grounded in its core mission of engaging in sustainable digital preservation through community collaboration, while operating with the knowledge that we cannot expect a different result by trying the same things. We have to do things differently to get the long term success we are all working towards. In this case, doing things differently means:

Addressing the costs of existing technical debt

In the first quarter of 2023, we have created an ideal operations budget, intended to move MetaArchive out of an austerity mindset and into a more sustainable resourcing model. In the second quarter of 2023, we are researching and proposing different fundraising strategies to the membership that may help us reach these goals.

Improving the ability of the cooperative to plan for contingencies

In the first quarter of 2023, we created and updated several procedural governance documents, including an operating reserve policy and a contingency plan for sunsetting the network. During this process, we spoke to a number of other digital preservation networks about their own practices for succession and contingency planning. We are also exploring partnerships with other networks and services, as well as a strategic reassessment of our infrastructure, that will make MetaArchive more resilient to change.

Identifying the service capabilities that need to be developed in order to meaningfully lower the barrier to entry for participation in the network

In the second quarter of 2023, we are engaging in one-on-one conversations with all members, gathering information about current barriers to participation in the network. We have identified both ingest and reporting functionalities as major areas for improvement, and we are working in partnership with the LOCKSS team at Stanford to identify areas for improvement and support between MetaArchive and LOCKSS. Another area of focus for this work is revisiting our pricing model, in order to make sure that MetaArchive is lowering financial barriers where possible in order to foster an equitable approach to digital preservation.

We recognize that MetaArchive’s future not only impacts our own members, but also our strategic partners, stakeholders, and the broader digital preservation community. The success of community-driven digital preservation rests on a framework of transparency and deep collaboration, and we are moving through this process in that spirit. If you have any questions about this work and MetaArchive’s future directions, please contact the Leadership Team at ma_leadership@metaarchive.org.

MetaArchive Community Research Task Force (May – July 2023)

Reid Boehm
Brandon Locke
Shanna Smith
Zach Vowell
Hannah Wang
Christine Wiseman

Thank you to the previous members of the MetaArchive Community Research Task Force (January – April 2023) for all of their work and leadership:

Alex Kinnaman
Jessica Meyerson
Nathan Tallman


November 28, 2022

Announcing the 2023 MetaArchive Leadership Team Candidates

The MetaArchive Cooperative is pleased to announce the candidates for the 2023 Leadership Team election. Details about each position can be found in our Governance Procedures.

Elections will be held from November 28th, 2022 to December 9th, 2022.

Elected Leadership Team members will take office on January 1st, 2023.

The voting representative for each Institutional and Collaborative member will receive a ballot via email on November 28th.


Shanna Smith

Collection Information Specialist, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Running for: Chair

Candidate Statement

Shanna Smith is the Collection Information Specialist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (ISGM). Since starting at ISGM in 2020, she has gradually become more involved in the MetaArchive Cooperative. She currently serves as the secretary of the Leadership Team and co-chair of the Membership Services Committee. She looks forward to 2023 and the opportunity to continue to contribute to and serve the MetaArchive community.

Christine Wiseman

Head of the Digital Services Department, AUC Woodruff Library

Running for: Chair-Elect

Candidate Statement

As Head of the Digital Services Department at the AUC Woodruff Library, she serves as the primary liaison and technical support for the HBCU Library Alliance’s membership in the MetaArchive Cooperative. She has really enjoyed her role serving as a liaison to the Alliance, hosting the LOCKSS server, and advocating for the preservation and access of collections from HBCUs. Recently, there is escalating interest among HBCU Library Alliance members in expanding the breadth and depth of their digital presence, and Christine looks forward to integrating digital preservation into that effort. Involvement in the MetaArchive Cooperative has provided the AUC Woodruff Library staff with opportunities to contribute to the profession in enriching ways including serving on committees and working groups. They have expanded their expertise and knowledge around digital preservation practices and broadened their network of professional contacts. Membership in MetaArchive has tangentially connected them with high profile grant projects including the Library Publishing Coalition Workflows Project and the OssArcFlow (Born Digital Archival Workflows) Documentation Project.

Christine has gained much professionally from her involvement in MetaArchive during her tenure at AUC. As the cooperative finds itself at a pivotal moment of change, she hopes she can contribute to the vision and forward progression as the MetaArchive Cooperative approaches two decades of providing community based digital preservation.


Hannah Pryor

Archivist for University Records and Records Manager, University of Louisville

Running for: Secretary

Candidate Statement

Hannah Pryor is an archives and records management professional with 7+ years of experience in state government and higher education. She currently works at the University of Louisville as their Archivist for University Records and Records Manager and often works with born-digital and digitized university records. She has previously served as recording secretary for the Oklahoma Archivists Association and the board of commissioners for a state agency. Currently a member of the Membership Services Committee, she would love the opportunity to get more involved and use her organizational skills to serve MetaArchive.


February 1, 2022

MetaArchive Explores Next-Generation Digital Preservation Solutions

The MetaArchive Cooperative has begun a multi-phase research and development project to create a modern distributed digital preservation system. The primary goal is to leverage technical infrastructure advancements in the commercial sector to simplify digital preservation systems and make them more sustainable. These advancements include software defined storage, self-healing file systems, and functions-as-a-service. MetaArchive Technical Committee co-chair Nathan Tallman recently had a journal article published that explores these concepts further.

MetaArchive is partnering with Keeper Technology (KeeperTech) on this project. KeeperTech, based in Virginia, has deep expertise in building modern, secure, and integral data storage and processing solutions for corporations and government agencies. This multi-phase project has exit ramps for either partner at the conclusion of each phase, when specific proposals for the next phase will be developed and approved.

Phase 1 of this project, estimated to take between 2-3 months, will be a collaborative exploration and definition of functional requirements for a distributed digital preservation system. Phase 2 will build on these requirements with KeeperTech developing a prototype system. Phase 3 will consider options for production deployment and implementation alongside LOCKSS, long used by MetaArchive to achieve bit-level digital preservation. All three phases will occur alongside the day-to-day operations and maintenance on the MetaArchive network.

MetaArchive and KeeperTech kicked off Phase 1 in earnest in January 2022. Community Facilitator Hannah Wang and Technical Committee co-chair Nathan Tallman have recently met with the KeeperTech team to share demonstrations of LOCKSS and Conspectus (MetaArchive’s tool for creating archival units in LOCKSS). Bonnie Gordon, from MetaArchive member Rockefeller Archive Center, also presented Archivematica and discussed digital preservation workflows. Soon, KeeperTech will engage the Cooperative with a questionnaire and focus groups to identify current functional requirements of the community. MetaArchive has already provided several inputs into this process to KeeperTech including prioritized, ranked, and justified criteria for digital preservation storage using the Digital Preservation Storage Criteria; a SWOT analysis of LOCKSS; and OSSArcFlow workflow analysis diagrams.

MetaArchive is excited to engage in this important work to advance the digital preservation community. Functional requirements and software code from the project will be openly-licensed and shared with the community for feedback at the end of each phase. We look forward to being able to share the first outputs.


November 15, 2021

Announcing the MetaArchive 2021 Leadership Team Candidates

The MetaArchive Cooperative is pleased to announce the candidates for the 2021 Leadership Team election. Details about each position can be found in our Governance Procedures.

Elections will be held from November 22nd, 2021 to December 10th, 2021.

Elected Leadership Team members will take office on January 1st, 2022.

The voting representative for each Institutional and Collaborative member will receive a ballot via email on November 22nd.


Bonnie Gordon

Rockefeller Archive Center

Running for: Chair-Elect

Biography

Bonnie Gordon is a Digital Archivist at the Rockefeller Archive Center, where she focuses on digital preservation, born digital records, and training around technology. Previously, she worked at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. She received her M.A. in Archives and Public History from New York University and her B.A. in History from Purchase College, SUNY.

Election Statement

I have been actively involved in many open source communities, including other communities housed by Educopia. I think open source communities and infrastructure are vital for sustainable digital preservation, and therefore I am looking forward to the opportunity to take an active role in leading the MetaArchive Cooperative’s efforts. I am also excited to bring the perspective of the Rockefeller Archive Center, an independent archives and research center. While longtime members of the Cooperative, we had paused while we solidified our digital preservation policies and digital infrastructure. As we ramp back up, I hope to help advance the MetaArchive community’s goals.

Alex Kinnaman

Virginia Tech

Running for: Treasurer

Biography

I joined the Virginia Tech University Libraries as the Digital Preservation Coordinator in 2017. I have a Bachelor’s in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MSLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My work at Virginia Tech is largely policy writing, collaborating on developing and implementing preservation workflows, and consulting with my colleagues on preservation needs. My research interests are in repository certification metrics, digital preservation documentation, and the preservation of 3D objects and Digital Humanities projects. We are currently in the process of responding to a CoreTrustSeal application for our Digital Libraries Platform. I reside in Blacksburg, VA, I enjoy reading, running, and all things spooky, and my cats Finn and Opal who can’t wait to talk to people on my video calls!

Election Statement

I am running for the Treasurer position. Last fall I was elected into the position of Secretary on the Leadership Team, which has given me a higher-level experience in the MetaArchive Cooperative. I have also served as the co-chair for the Outreach Committee since fall 2020 and work with many fantastic committee members to increase engagement and reach in the digipres community. I believe that serving as Treasurer will be an excellent opportunity for me to engage further with MetaArchive and help make decisions that will further progress our community, as well as an opportunity for personal growth. I look forward to serving and to helping support the forward-movement of MetaArchive. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Shanna Smith

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Running for: Secretary

Biography

Shanna Smith is the Collection Information Specialist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the current co-chair of the Membership Services Committee. She holds a MLIS from Simmons University and has worked in libraries, universities, and museums.

Election Statement

I am excited by the opportunity to serve in the Secretary Position for the Leadership Team. As co-chair of the Membership Services Committee I’m familiar with the importance of recording and distributing minutes form all Leadership Team Meetings. I am humbled by the nomination and if elected I look forward to share my unique institutional experience and support MetaArchive community in this position in the coming year.

July 27, 2021

MetaArchive’s New Mission, Vision, and Values

The MetaArchive Cooperative is pleased to introduce the community to MetaArchive’s newly revised Mission, Vision, and Values Statement.

MetaArchive Mission: “To engage in sustainable digital preservation through community collaboration.”

MetaArchive Vision: “Preserving the past, harnessing the present, preparing for the future”

Revising and developing our Mission and Vision began in 2019 as part of the Changing for Continued Impact (CFCI) series. We wanted to ensure that what the MetaArchive stands for and abides by is reflected in our Mission and Vision statements and to revisit our values as a community. This discussion took an entire session of the CFCI process where all members were given time to brainstorm in a shared document and generate a list of potential options for both the Mission and Vision statements. Small groups were assigned to workshop the lists to finalize a few options individually and report back to the community. The end of CFCI did not bring any final decisions as we had so many moving parts coming together at that point. Recently the Leadership Team revisited the previous notes to explore options and continue workshopping. After narrowing down the options, the Leadership Team presented them to the community for feedback.

Our new Values Statement is an updated version of our previous Operational Principles that better reflects our revised Mission and Vision statements:

  • Encourage and support the long-term preservation of digital content;
  • Promote a cooperative, robust, and decentralized approach to digital preservation;
  • Encourage archives, libraries, research institutes, museums, and other such organizations to build their own preservation infrastructures and knowledge rather than outsourcing this core service to external vendors;
  • Encourage the growth of distributed digital preservation networks for preserving copies of replicated content in secure, distributed locations over time;
  • Maintain a minimal overhead and straightforward mechanisms for collaboration;
  • Administer services that have wide applicability to a range of organizations and digital content;
  • Utilize and create open standards and systems;
  • Ensure that digital materials are stored and maintained in migratable formats and data structures;
  • Promote and support high standards for preservation metadata capture;
  • Undertake research and development projects to advance digital preservation best practices

In addition to these values, we support and adhere to the Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values.

MetaArchive looks forward to upholding our new guiding statements and supporting our community. If you have any questions please contact Community Facilitator Hannah Wang at hannah.wang@educopia.org.


June 17, 2021

MetaArchive Announces New Membership Levels

The MetaArchive Cooperative is very happy to announce that we are now welcoming new and returning members under our new membership levels! These new levels and terms signal exciting changes for the Cooperative.

These changes were driven by the MetaArchive members during and after the Changing for Continued Impact (CFCI) Series, a program of intensive evaluations of both our organizational model and our technical approaches to distributed digital preservation. For more information about the outcomes of CFCI, see the blog post written by Matt Schultz, former MetaArchive Community Facilitator.

The new membership levels were authored by two long-time members of the Cooperative, Rachel Howard from the University of Louisville and Deanna Ulvestad from the Greene County Public Library in Ohio, and unanimously approved by the MetaArchive Steering Committee on December 14, 2020.

So what has changed?

Simplified Membership Levels

Here is the nitty gritty of what has actually changed with the membership options offered by MetaArchive:

Pre-2021 2021 and beyond
Sustaining Members: Single organizations that provided leadership for the Cooperative and engaged in preservation activities.

Annual fee: $5,500 (+ technology fee, if applicable)

Preservation Members: Single organizations that engaged in preservation activities.

Annual fee: $3,000 (+ technology fee, if applicable)

Institutional Members: Single organizations that provide leadership for the Cooperative and engage in preservation activities.

Annual fee: $4,000

Collaborative Members: Groups of institutions (often consortia) that engaged in preservation activities.

Annual fee: $2,500 + $100/member (+ technology fee, if applicable)

Collaborative Members: Groups of institutions (often consortia) that provide leadership for the Cooperative and engage in preservation activities.

Annual fee: $4,000 + $100/member

Individual Members: Individual practitioners who can now join the Cooperative for free in order to learn about and participate in the community

Annual fee: None

Each Institutional and Collaborative member designates one Voting Representative, and anyone from an Institutional or Collaborative member organization is eligible to serve in a leadership position.

As an incentive for new organizations joining the MetaArchive Cooperative under these terms, we are offering 50% off your first year of membership!

NEW! Storage Rewards

MetaArchive members are given the option to host a LOCKSS cache at their organization. LOCKSS caches are the backbone of the MetaArchive Technical Network – content is geographically distributed across multiple caches, which automatically check in with each other to verify that the content remains complete and identical over time.

In past years, members who have opted not to host LOCKSS caches have paid a $1,000 technology fee instead. With the new membership terms, we have flipped that structure: instead of charging members who do not host caches, we are rewarding members who do host caches. This is in recognition of the time, labor, and money that is involved in setting up and maintaining a LOCKSS cache.

Under the new storage rewards system, members who host a LOCKSS cache receive 10% of contributed storage volume free. This means that, if you provide 48 TB of storage volume through your LOCKSS cache, you will be able to ingest and store 4.8 TB of digital content in the network for free. Any storage used beyond that 10% will be subject to annual storage fees (as of 2021, $0.50/GB/year).

NEW! Individual Memberships

We are most excited to start implementing the Individual Membership option. In the past, if an individual left their MetaArchive member organization, or if their organization left the Cooperative, there was no way for those practitioners to continue to engage in MetaArchive. This community is tight-knit and filled with exciting voices in the field – it is a loss to say goodbye to any of those people!

These new Individual Memberships allow practitioners to join the Cooperative for free. This opens the door not only to former members, but also to any practitioners without a MetaArchive affiliation who are interested in learning about distributed digital preservation and engaging with this community. Individual Members cannot make use of the MetaArchive Technical Network for the preservation of digital collections, and they do not have voting rights in the Cooperative. Individual members can, however, attend meetings, serve on committees, and engage with other members in peer mentoring programs.

We have already begun welcoming new Individual Members to the Cooperative, and we are excited to spread the word! Reach out to Hannah Wang, MetaArchive Community Facilitator, at hannah.wang@educopia.org if you are interested in joining as an Individual Member.

Learn More

Head over to Join Us to learn more about our membership options. If you are ready to take the plunge and talk to someone about membership, get in touch with Hannah Wang, Community Facilitator, at hannah.wang@educopia.org.


May 28, 2020

MetaArchive Member Profile: Oregon State University Libraries

By: Michael Boock, Associate Professor/Scholarly Communication Librarian

MetaArchive Member Profiles

Tell us a bit about the digital preservation program at your organization?

Oregon State University Libraries has been firmly committed to the long term preservation of the scholarship of the university and its unique digital assets as far back as 2008 when Terry Reese was appointed to an endowed position with responsibilities for building the digital preservation infrastructure of the Libraries. During his tenure, the Libraries began using LOCKSS for preserving journal content and joined the MetaArchive Cooperative as a sustaining member.  Our digital preservation operations were vastly improved after 2012 with the hire of Brian Davis as Digital Production Unit Head , who developed format-specific identification, validation, characterization, and fixity checking of digitized content. The Libraries further committed to digital preservation in a 2012-2017 strategic plan that called for the creation of a “robust and flexible digital preservation and curation infrastructure” and “a long-term preservation system for university scholarship and digital collections developed and curated by OSU Libraries and Press.”

Looking ahead, what are you excited about, or what’s on the horizon for your program?

Brian and I presented a report to library leadership in 2017 that described the current state of the library’s digital preservation efforts and recommended next steps for preserving the Libraries digital objects. Emblematic of how quickly things are changing in the digital preservation space, many of the report recommendations have shifted over the last couple of years, but I am thrilled to say that some of the recommendations, in particular upgrading the library’s backup and storage systems to include monthly and incremental daily backups and the increased use of Archivematica for processing digital objects before repository ingest.

MetaArchive Member Profile: Oregon State University Libraries. Aside from our use of MetaArchive to preserve substantial amounts of our most important digital content, I value MetaArchive for its community of experts. It is immensely valuable to be able to learn from leaders in our field.
” Aside from our use of MetaArchive to preserve substantial amounts of our most important digital content, I value MetaArchive for its community of experts. It is immensely valuable to be able to learn from leaders in our field.
Pictured, Top Row, L-R: Michael Boock, Associate Professor/Scholarly Communication Librarian; Brian Davis, Digital Production Unit Supervisor. Bottom Row, L-R: Hui Zhang, Associate Professor/Digital Services Librarian; Margaret Mellinger, Associate Professor/Director, Emerging Technologies and Services

Tell us a bit about your local workflow. How has the MetaArchive preservation storage service been incorporated?

As noted, for digitized objects, a breadth of preservation work is done to ensure content validation and fixity for digitized objects. The master, preservation-level files are then moved onto ZFS storage systems via a BagIt protocol. For born-digital scholarship housed in the Samvera/Fedora based ScholarsArchive@OSU institutional repository, file integrity using a checksum tool is checked as part of file ingestion. Dr. Hui Zhang, digital services librarian, uses a script that traverses the hierarchy of repository objects in the institutional repository to locate and export binary files with the RDF metadata from specific repository collections. The generated BAGs are then moved to temporary Amazon Web Services storage for MetaArchive harvesting.

What types of digital collections are you focusing on for preservation in MetaArchive? What will preserving those collections for the long-term mean for their users or your institution? How are some of those collections used now?

The Libraries first used MetaArchive to replicate the university’s corpus of Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Theses and dissertations represent the breadth of significant research and scholarship conducted at the university over its entire history, and also serve as an important historical record of the OSU research and teaching interests. MetaArchive is also used to replicate all of the University’s Extension and Experiment Station Communication Publications (EESC). As noted in this editorial from the Corvallis Gazette-Times, published after the EESC collection of over 6,000 technical reports were digitized and made available in the IR, many of the same issues that were important to Oregon residents 100 years ago continue to be important today. Preserving this content with MetaArchive’s robust Private LOCKSS network helps to ensure that it will be available to citizens today and long into the future.

An Editorial from the Corvallis Gazette-Times: After 100 years, Extension still valuable.

Editorial from the Corvallis Gazette-Times, published after the EESC collection of over 6,000 technical reports were digitized and made available in the IR, noted that many of the same issues that were important to Oregon residents 100 years ago continue to be important today.

Tell us about your experience in participating in the MetaArchive community. How has it influenced you or your work?

I have personally served as OSU’s representative on the MetaArchive Steering Team since 2015 and as this year’s Chair of the Steering Team.  When I joined the Steering Team five years ago, I had a strong interest in digital preservation, but I had very little idea about how to do it. As noted above, OSU Libraries has invested in staff and resources to improve digital preservation operations, but this work should not be done in a vacuum. Aside from our use of MetaArchive to preserve substantial amounts of our most important digital content, I value MetaArchive for its community of experts. It is immensely valuable to be able to learn from leaders in our field such as Katherine Skinner, Matt Schultz, and Sam Meister (former MetaArchive Community Manager), and to learn from colleagues from a variety of different library and museum types about their preservation work.

Tell us a bit about your experience participating in the Changing for Continued Impact Series? What have been some of your key takeaways from the series thus far?

As Katherine Skinner (Executive Director of Educopia) noted to members last year, MetaArchive, as the world’s longest tenured distributed digital preservation solution in the world, has been in place and operating within the same technology base and governance structure since its inception. As part of this Series, our community has had an opportunity to hear from experts in the field about alternative technological approaches. It has been invaluable to me to learn from experts in the field, and MetaArchive’s own experts like Nathan Tallman (Penn State) and Zach Vowell (Cal State Poly), that there are alternative solutions that are ripe for further exploration by the community. Another key takeaway for me is that MetaArchive will remain viable as a preservation network only so long as we are prepared to transition to meet the needs of the community. Fortunately, the transparency of the network and its governance structure helps to ensure that the community’s needs will continue to be met.

Editorial note: “Since late 2019 the MetaArchive community has been undergoing a series of intensive evaluations of both their organizational model as well as their technical approaches to distributed digital preservation (DDP). This is the Changing for Continued Impact (CFCI) Series, a facilitated framework led by Educopia that engages the MetaArchive members in a series of focused-discussions and work-sessions. This generative and co-creative process got underway in earnest this past Fall 2019, and will continue through Spring 2020 leading up to the next Annual MetaArchive Membership Meeting.”


April 15, 2020

MetaArchive Member Profile: Virginia Tech University Libraries

By: Alex Kinnaman, Digital Preservation Coordinator, and Nathan Hall, Director of Digital Imaging and Preservation

MetaArchive Member Profiles

Tell us a bit about the digital preservation program at your organization?

Virginia Tech University Libraries was a founding member of the MetaArchive Cooperative and has hosted a LOCKSS cache since 2007. Our preservation system has evolved since then, including the addition of a second distributed digital preservation service with APTrust, the hiring of two digital preservation faculty members in 2017, and the ongoing development of a preservation-centric Digital Library Platform. The preservation system is managed by the Director of Digital Imaging and Preservation Services, the Digital Preservation Coordinator, and the Digital Preservation Technologist, and it is implemented by the Digital Library Development team in the Library. This group is responsible for developing and maintaining policies, overseeing workflows, and collaborating with our content producers. We are currently working on our Digital Preservation Program Priorities and Deliverables, outlining policies, services, and automations to be integrated with our new platform in development.

Looking ahead, what are you excited about, or what’s on the horizon for your program?

We have recently received a grant to digitize the Virginia Tech Insect Collection in 3D using photogrammetry in collaboration with the Entomology Department. 3D objects are complex and dynamic objects that present a preservation challenge, and we are investigating how our preservation workflow for these objects will differ from workflows for simpler objects. We are also developing a more robust Digital Humanities support system in the Libraries and are collaborating with VT Publishing to develop preservation levels for the variety of DH projects we hope to host. Ultimately, we are excited to have an automated preservation system built into the Digital Library Platform that communicates directly with MetaArchive.

MetaArchive is integral to our preservation system, particularly since the MetaArchive network is where we store or most unique and valuable content.
MetaArchive is integral to our preservation system, particularly since the MetaArchive network is where we store or most unique and valuable content.
L-R: Nathan Hall, Director of Digital Imaging and Preservation; Alex Kinnaman, Digital Preservation Coordinator; and Luke Menzies, Digital Preservation Technologist

Tell us a bit about your local workflow. How has the MetaArchive preservation storage service been incorporated?

Our current workflows are under revision as our new Digital Library Platform is in its beta form. In the past we performed our MetaArchive ingests manually; we are working on a MetaArchive Automation Service to better streamline our preservation system. MetaArchive currently holds all of our digitized bound theses and dissertations prior to 2017. While we have not ingested content into MetaArchive during our preservation system development, we have maintained an active role in hosting our cache and staying active within the community.

Tell us about your experience in participating in the MetaArchive community. How has it influenced you or your work?

Virginia Tech University Libraries has been an active member in MetaArchive since 2004, both as a cache host and in the community, including Steering Committee participation, and committee participation. The Change for Continued Impact Series has enabled us to engage more in the community and offer feedback. We have often relied on this community for advice or discussion in making our preservation decisions. MetaArchive is integral to our preservation system, particularly since the MetaArchive network is where we store our most unique and valuable content.

Tell us a bit about your experience participating in the Changing for Continued Impact Series? What have been some of your key takeaways from the series thus far?

We have been active in the Changed for Continued Impact Series, and appreciate the expanded interest in community needs and comprehensive engagement. One of the most valuable outcomes thus far has been the MetaArchive-LOCKSS Sustainability Evaluations provided by Penn State and Cal Poly, as they are in line with our needs at Virginia Tech as we develop an automated system.

Editorial note: “Since late 2019 the MetaArchive community has been undergoing a series of intensive evaluations of both their organizational model as well as their technical approaches to distributed digital preservation (DDP). This is the Changing for Continued Impact (CFCI) Series, a facilitated framework led by Educopia that engages the MetaArchive members in a series of focused-discussions and work-sessions. This generative and co-creative process got underway in earnest this past Fall 2019, and will continue through Spring 2020 leading up to the next Annual MetaArchive Membership Meeting.”


March 25, 2020

MetaArchive Member Profile: University of Louisville Archives & Special Collections

By: Kyna Herzinger, Archivist for Record Management, and Rachel Howard, Digital Initiatives Librarian

MetaArchive Member Profiles

Tell us a bit about the digital preservation program at your organization?

Our colleague, Rare Books Curator Delinda Buie, happened to be in the right place at the right time when Martin Halbert and others discussed applying for an NDIIPP (National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program) grant to explore distributed digital preservation at an ARL (Association of Research Libraries) meeting in 2003. At the time, UofL did not have a formal digitization program, but the Special Collections department, in which Delinda worked, had been doing ad hoc digitization for customer orders and exhibits for several years. The successful NDIIPP grant evolved into the MetaArchive Cooperative, and locally led to the creation of the Digital Initiatives program, in which Rachel Howard has served since 2006 and has overseen Digital Collections of cultural heritage materials and an institutional repository of university scholarship. UofL’s digital preservation efforts focused on digitized images and oral histories. In 2017, after Kyna Herzinger had joined the team, UofL took steps to develop a framework for a digital preservation program, drafting policies, exploring tools, and documenting workflows.  At that time, UofL’s digital preservation expanded to include born-digital university records, oral histories, and community collections.

Looking ahead, what are you excited about, or what’s on the horizon for your program?

In terms of content, we are looking forward to preserving our electronic theses and dissertations, which are currently backed up in the cloud. We plan to establish a workflow to have them harvested into the MetaArchive network. In terms of maturing our overall program, we have identified two areas of focus. Having no single position that is responsible for handling born-digital content, we are still ensuring that our curators can accession and process their own born-digital collections.  This means fine-tuning workflows. We are also starting to shift focus toward improving access to born-digital content, both in terms of discovery and researcher support.

“We both enjoy knowing a welcoming community of people who are engaged in similar work and are always willing to share advice or lend an ear. As we assess the resources at our disposal, we are especially cognizant of the role that MetaArchive plays as our most robust storage option. It provides what we could not have done ourselves: secure, distributed, bit-level preservation.”
In photo, L-R: Rachel Howard, Kyna Herzinger

Tell us a bit about your local workflow. How has the MetaArchive preservation storage service been incorporated?

For digitized content, after creating master and access files and metadata and launching a digital collection to the public, Rachel would copy master files and an XML file of the metadata to a staging server and organize them into archival units (AUs) of acceptable size for ingest into the MetaArchive network. The size of those AUs grew over time as we tested network capabilities, so that, for example, our yearbooks, whose master files ballooned to as much as 50 GB per yearbook, could each be treated as a single AU, thus requiring less “data wrangling”. She would then create a manifest page and (as was required in the early days) plugin, document the locations of those files and the AUs in the MetaArchive Conspectus database, and then work with MetaArchive partners to test and then ingest the collection into the preservation storage network. 

Now, with born-digital content, we use the BagIt profile specification, and recently participated in the MetaArchive’s SuperNode Pilot project, testing Bagit + OwnCloud and Exactly + SFTP to ingest content into the network.

Tell us about your experience in participating in the MetaArchive community. How has it influenced you or your work?

We both enjoy knowing a welcoming community of people who are engaged in similar work and are always willing to share advice or lend an ear. Working together with this group has also provided us with  opportunities for research and professional leadership/ service at an international level. As we assess the resources at our disposal, we are especially cognizant of the role that the MetaArchive plays as our most robust storage option.  It provides what we could not have done ourselves: secure, distributed, bit-level preservation.

Tell us a bit about your experience participating in the Changing for Continued Impact Series? What have been some of your key takeaways from the series thus far?

It has been reenergizing to connect in a more focused way with the partners as we talk about the past, present, and future of the Cooperative. The series has provided reassurance that growing pains are normal, that challenges are opportunities for growth, and that it is better to be proactive about change than to wait until circumstances demand an immediate reaction.We appreciate being part of a community in which we have a say in its future.

Editorial note: “Since late 2019 the MetaArchive community has been undergoing a series of intensive evaluations of both their organizational model as well as their technical approaches to distributed digital preservation (DDP). This is the Changing for Continued Impact (CFCI) Series, a facilitated framework led by Educopia that engages the MetaArchive members in a series of focused-discussions and work-sessions. This generative and co-creative process got underway in earnest this past Fall 2019, and will continue through Spring 2020 leading up to the next Annual MetaArchive Membership Meeting.”


February 3, 2020

MetaArchive Member Profile: Indianapolis Public Library

By: William Knauth, Indianapolis Marion County Public Library, Digital Indy

MetaArchive Member Profiles

Tell us a bit about the digital preservation program at your organization?

The Digital Indy project has been a member of InDiPres since 2017, previous to this there had been concerns about the integrity and longevity of the digital archival collections being created by the project and an analysis found that the level of preservation and cost associated with InDiPres was the best available. The primary work of preparing and transferring digital collections to the InDiPres server is done as part of the role of the Metadata Specialist, as well as communication with the InDiPres and MetaArchive groups. I regularly attend and participate at meetings of these organizations and report back developments to the team at the library. As far as goals and visions for our involvement with this project I would be very pleased if we are able to preserve 100% of our large digital collections in the MetaArchive network by 2021. I would also like to see the ongoing Supernode efforts materialize into an efficient streamlined ingest system that would attract new members to InDiPres and MetaArchive.

Looking ahead, what are you excited about, or what’s on the horizon for your program?

We are presently working on getting more of our collections data ingested into MetaArchive as well as setting up firm and effective workflows for sending data to the InDiPres staging server after some technical issues have placed this on hold. I am excited to see how this will be made more efficient by some of the projects being worked on at MetaArchive.

MetaArchive Member Profile: Indianapolis Public Library
“We are presently working on getting more of our collections data ingested into MetaArchive as well as setting up firm and effective workflows for sending data to the InDiPres staging server after some technical issues have placed this on hold. I am excited to see how this will be made more efficient by some of hte projects being worked on at MetaArchive.”

Pictured, L-R: William Knauth, Victoria Duncan, Beth Franklin, and Meaghan Fukunaga (formerly of InDiPres)

Tell us a bit about your local workflow. How has the MetaArchive preservation storage service been incorporated?

Our team has not had to significantly alter the established workflows in the initial areas of organizing and describing collections. The current standards we use are sufficiently robust as to create results that are effective for preservation purposes. We have had to make some additions to the workflows for successful ingest. This has involved processing collections through data integrity programs like Bagger and Exactly, setting up online transfer protocols, and creating documentation for preservation status of collections.

Tell us about your experience in participating in the MetaArchive community. How has it influenced you or your work?

I have had a positive experience meeting and working with the MetaArchive community in the several years of my involvement with the organization. I have found the membership to be very informed about both their own digital preservation situation and the state of this field of expertise in general. It has been useful and beneficial to have a group of individuals facing similar challenges to share ideas and solutions with.


January 14, 2020

MetaArchive Member Profile: Purdue University

By: Sandi Caldrone and Michael Witt

MetaArchive Member Profiles

Tell us a bit about the digital preservation program at your organization?

The Purdue University Research Repository, also known as PURR (insert cat joke here), is one of a couple of Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies repositories which utilize MetaArchive for preservation storage. PURR is a university core research facility provided by the Libraries, the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships, and Information Technology at Purdue. It provides an online, collaborative working space, data sharing, and publication platform for Purdue researchers and their collaborators. PURR also provides preservation support for published datasets and the MetaArchive Cooperative is a huge part of that preservation support.

Looking ahead, what are you excited about, or what’s on the horizon for your program?

We’ve recently started to talk with faculty members who create virtual reality (VR) environments and objects as part of their research. VR preservation is an exciting and challenging new area for us and we are looking into how our platform and preservation workflows can support the preservation of VR objects and what new features or support we might need to develop down the road.

“We’ve recently started to talk with faculty members who create virtual reality (VR) environments and objects as part of their research. VR preservation is an exciting and challenging new area for us and we are looking into how our platform and preservation workflows can support VR preservation and what new features we might need to develop down the road.”

Pictured back row L-R: Standa Pejša, Carly Dearborn, Matthew Kroll, Michael Witt. Front row L-R: Clair Stirm, Anthony Fuentes, Sandi Caldrone, and Yanqun Kuang.

Tell us a bit about your local workflow. How has the MetaArchive preservation storage service been incorporated?

We were lucky to have been still developing PURR when the Libraries joined the MetaArchive Cooperative and were able to develop our preservation infrastructure with a distributed model in mind. We use BagIt bags to package our datasets and metadata for preservation.

We also regularly try to think through a “fire drill” scenario—what would we do if we experience partial loss of content in our repository? This has proven to be a great way for us to interrogate the construction of our archival units and determine if we have embedded the necessary metadata to rebuild our local repository from our backups in MetaArchive.

Tell us about your experience in participating in the MetaArchive community. How has it influenced you or your work?

Digital Preservation is hard work, and MetaArchive has a demonstrated track record of success with the biggest challenges of digital preservation, which aren’t related to storage or technology, but governance and sustainability. It is so valuable to have a built-in community to troubleshoot the various issues that arise in digital processing, preservation planning, and everything in between. The MetaArchive Cooperative represents a mature solution and community—it isn’t a flash in the pan.


December 19, 2019

MetaArchive Member Profile: Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library

By: Josh Hogan on behalf of the Historically Black Colleges and University Library Alliance (HBCU LA)

MetaArchive Member Profiles

Tell us a bit about the digital preservation program at your organization?

Since 2010, the Atlanta University Center (AUC) Woodruff Library has served as the technical lead and host of the LOCKSS server on behalf of the HBCU Library Alliance’s membership in the MetaArchive Cooperative.  Digital preservation at the AUC Woodruff Library is implemented by the Digital Preservation Working Group (DPWG), a collaborative team with members from the Archives Research Center, the Digital Services Department, Records Management, and the IT Department.  The DPWG is responsible for identifying, acquiring, and providing the means to preserve and ensure ongoing access to selected digital assets and associated metadata in accordance with AUC Woodruff Library’s collection development policies. For the past three years, we have pursued a three-year plan to develop our policies, workflows, and priorities.

Looking ahead, what are you excited about, or what’s on the horizon for your program?

We are excited about recently completing a revision of our digital collection development policy, providing clarity to our collecting areas related to born digital materials. We are also pleased to have wrapped up our first three-year plan, completing all of our goals for the period. We are eager to tackle the development of the new three-year plan in the coming months with an eye toward taking the program to the next level.

Member Profile: Atlanta University Center Woodruff Library. "We are excited about recently completing a revision of our digital collection development policy, providing clarity to our collecting areas related to born digital materials. We are also pleased to have wrapped up our first three-year plan, completing all of the goals for the period. We're eager to tackle the development of the new three-year plan in the coming months with an eye toward taking the program to the next level." Photograph of Cliff Landis, Jessica Leming, Robert Fallen, Josh Hogan, Alex Dade, Aletha Carter, Suteera Apichatabutra, Christine Wiseman.
“We are excited about recently completing a revision of our digital collection development policy, providing clarity to our collecting areas related to born digital materials. We are also pleased to have wrapped up our first three-year plan, completing all of the goals for the period. We’re eager to tackle the development of the new three-year plan in the coming months with an eye toward taking the program to the next level.”

Pictured back row L-R: Cliff Landis, Jessica Leming, Robert Fallen, Josh Hogan. Front row L-R: Alex Dade, Aletha Carter, Suteera Apichatabutra, Christine Wiseman

Tell us a bit about your local workflow. How has the MetaArchive preservation storage service been incorporated?

Our local workflow identifies three broad categories of material to be preserved: born digital archival material, digitized archival material, and born digital institutional photographs and records. In addition to these categories, there are two tiers related to the priority of preserving the object or collection. The first tier objects are those of the highest priority, and these will be the ones that we will seek to ingest into robust preservation networks such as MetaArchive. Second tier objects and collections will be preserved in at least two different geographical areas and stored on Amazon Glacier.

Tell us about your experience in participating in the MetaArchive community. How has it influenced you or your work?

The AUC Woodruff Library has long participated in MetaArchive as a member of the HBCU Library Alliance. Most of the material we have ingested has been digitized copies of the founding documentation of the participating HBCUs, and we have been the host site of that initiative since 2008.

We recently participated in the SuperNode Pilot Project, playing the role of one of the ingesting institutions. This participation helped us ingest a significant portion of the digital material that we have identified as tier one, and it helped us evaluate the use of Exactly and OwnCloud as tools for use in our program. We hope that feedback provided to MetaArchive Steering Committee will be useful in determining the future path of this intiative that could reduce barriers to digital preservation for smaller institutions.


February 27, 2019

New Steering Committee Chair – Carly Dearborn

Below is a message from Carly Dearborn, Digital Preservation and Electronic Records Archivist at Purdue University Libraries, who became Chair of the MetaArchive Steering Committee in January 2019.

When Purdue University joined the MetaArchive Cooperative in 2013, I was not aware of how  valuable to my professional life this community and its members would be. At its core, the MetaArchive is a distributed digital preservation network. But at its heart it is a dynamic community of practice – a community I have consulted many times in the last six years and one I am now excited to serve as Chair of the Steering Committee.

As the digital preservation and electronic records archivist at Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies, my work, by nature, is pragmatic. I hope to bring that pragmatism to the Steering Committee during my time as chair. The broad digital preservation principles and theory can seem far removed from practitioners who face the daily challenges of limited technical support, resources, time, and staffing. MetaArchive has has done well addressing these issues in the past and I hope to continue that work.

I am excited to work with the MetaArchive membership, committees, and community partners as we collectively pivot to meet emerging digital preservation challenges – both technical and organizational. MetaArchive initiatives like the Super Node Pilot Project address the digital preservation needs of small and large institutions alike, with a focus on sustainability and cost effective approaches to digital preservation. This project represents the very best of MetaArchive membership – collaboration of like-minded institutions and individuals around issues of shared importance. The lessons learned from the Super Node project, as with previous projects, will be shared with the larger digital preservation community, furthering the Cooperative’s commitment to transparency. I look forward to working with the Steering Committee to continue to redefine what transparency looks like in the digital preservation field and build on past efforts to critique the costs of digital preservation services.

2019 will be another exciting year for the MetaArchive Cooperative as we build on many of the same principles the community was founded on in 2004. Please feel free to reach out with any questions or comments at cdearbor@purdue.edu.


December 11, 2018

Message from the Steering Committee on DPN Sunset Announcement

Digital preservation is all about the long game. For the institutions and individuals working to ensure long-term access to our collective digital scholarly and cultural record, there is a shared understanding that our efforts today are part of a continuum that will continue well beyond our current contributions and participation. But understanding and recognition of this reality are only starting points. The way we go about this work, the structures we build, the strategies and approaches we implement, the relationships we foster and strengthen are all integral elements that impact our collective ability to be successful in this digital preservation endeavor. Technology is going to continue to change rapidly and the tools, infrastructure, and mechanisms we develop and implement in response will inevitably change, or disappear. Some technologies will fail quickly, others may work for a time but then wither because they are no longer relevant, or resources are no longer available to maintain and improve them.

The announcement of sunsetting of the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) represents a significant moment in the digital preservation community. It is one that we are saddened by, and recognize that many institutions will be affected by this event, including DPN members, partners, and collaborators. When such an organization ceases operations, those that have connections to it may feel an undercurrent of instability moving through the digital preservation community. In this case, though, our hope is that the closure instead amplifies the stability that we, as a library, archives, and museum community, are fostering through our deliberate collaborations across digital preservation communities.

Specifically, in anticipation (as we must anticipate!) that not all services or communities will last “forever,” a number of digital preservation communities and organizations began to gather together in 2009 with the Library of Congress to discuss how best to bridge our efforts to attain our overarching goal of protecting the digital heritage entrusted to each of us. This work ebbed and flowed over the last decade, most recently culminating in the development of the Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values. Issued by representatives of Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust), Chronopolis, CLOCKSS, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), Digital Preservation Network (DPN), DuraSpace, Educopia/MetaArchive Cooperative, HathiTrust, Stanford University – LOCKSS, Texas Digital Library (TDL), Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL), the Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values represents the efforts of these organizations to formulate a set of shared foundational values that can serve as a basis for continued collaboration and support. While the sunsetting of DPN as an organization may illustrate the aspirational nature of these values, it also emphasizes the importance of the collective approach to their creation, where multiple digital preservation services providers came together to establish a foundation upon which to base future collaborations as well as peer-to-peer assessment and accountability. There is a spirit of cooperation that permeates throughout the digital preservation community, and we will continue to be stronger and more successful if we build upon this through increased collaboration.

All that said this is a useful moment for reflecting and taking stock of the reality that all of us are doing our work in risk-filled environments. Organizational structures are very important. The organizational environment in which digital preservation technical infrastructure, tools, and systems are developed, tested, implemented, and retired have a direct impact on their longevity and sustainability. Recognizing the risk of a single point of failure phenomenon, the distributed digital preservation approach seeks to harness the collective efforts of multiple institutions to work together and take responsibility for preserving each other’s digital content. But distributing copies of the bits is the easy (relatively) part. Establishing and evolving the apparatus of community governance, wherein multiple institutions commit to active participation in shared ownership and strategic decision-making is challenging, but absolutely necessary to weathering the technological storms of the future.

For the MetaArchive Cooperative, while setting up a distributed digital preservation storage network using the LOCKSS software took a good amount of time, effort, and funding, creating the policies and procedures for community governance required significantly more resources and years of time investment. The result of this effort is a healthy, stable community whose principles are embedded within it’s regular technical and administrative operations. At the top of the list of these principles is transparency. All MetaArchive documentation, from committee meeting minutes to financial reports and budgets are openly available to members and can be requested by non-members. All members have an opportunity to provide input in strategic decisions, including structural changes such as membership fees. Transparency is always a work-in-progress, requiring continual effort and attention, but is essential for ensuring accountability and fostering an environment of community ownership and participation. This embrace of transparency led to the creation of the “Getting to the Bottom Line: 20 Cost Questions for Digital Preservation” by the MetaArchive Outreach Committee in 2015. This resource received very positive feedback from the larger digital preservation community, and remains a useful starting place for institutions evaluating digital preservation service / solution providers.

MetaArchive is itself in the midst of a transition to evolve its infrastructure in response to the changes in institutional needs and practices. We are committed to sharing what we learn during this process with the larger community, and collaborating with our peer community-based digital preservation service providers, in alignment with the recent messages from DPN and Duraspace on discussing lessons learned and strategies for increasing sustainability within and across our organizations.

We welcome any questions or feedback.


December 4, 2018

MetaArchive Quarterly Newsletter Launch!

The MetaArchive Cooperative is delighted to announce and share our first quarterly newsletter! In it, you’ll find a wealth of information on our most recent activities, including an brief overview of our SuperNode Pilot Project, plus member snapshots and new publications from community members.

If you’d like to receive future editions of the newsletter and other community announcements, please be sure to subscribe here. For those of you who may not be familiar, the MetaArchive Cooperative is member-owned and governed community that operates a geographically distributed digital preservation storage network, that currently includes 15 secure, closed-access preservation nodes and more than 200TB of content. More than just a storage solution, MetaArchive is a community of practice that provides support for members who are developing local digital preservation workflows, policies, and best practices.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at sam@educopia.org.

We hope to see you on our newsletter list!


September 25, 2018

Announcing the SuperNode Pilot Project

Since its inception, the MetaArchive Cooperative has been a community of practice built on a foundation of individuals and institutions collaborating to empower and enable each other to accomplish digital preservation goals. This structure of this collaboration is embedded within the implementation of the LOCKSS software, where member institutions store copies of each others content, achieving geographic distribution to protect against various types of risks and loss. Now going 12 years strong, this award-winning service has proved to be a trustworthy, durable solution for digital preservation storage and a community of support for practitioners.

At the same time a lot has changed in the digital preservation landscape over the last decade. More and more academic institutions are moving to cloud-based IT services, including for storage of digital content. Institutions can choose from multiple repository software platforms to integrate into their digital curation and preservation workflows.

While much has changed, what has lingered is who has been left out of this advancement in digital preservation progress. Small institutions, including public libraries, small museums, art galleries, community organizations, still struggle to implement basic digital preservation activities, due to limited IT support, cost of current solutions, and lack of time. Recognizing this continued need, the MetaArchive has focused its efforts on transitioning its technical network infrastructure to simplify the ingest process, making it easier for all member institutions, especially smaller organizations to start preserving their important cultural and scholarly materials.  

The SuperNode Pilot Project, which kicked off in June 2018, is conducting additional testing to determine the feasibility and specific requirements for evolving the technical infrastructure. This includes testing multiple transfer tools (such as AVPreserve’s Exactly), and options for utilizing cloud-based services to “stage” content for ingest to storage nodes hosted at member institutions. A significant aspect of this work will be measuring and analyzing the costs associated with the different “flavors” or versions of a SuperNode network to support a primary driver of continuing to provide an affordable digital preservation storage solution, and if possible, even lower current membership fees.

Set to move into implementation and production in 2019, the SuperNode Pilot Project is positioning the MetaArchive community to stay true to its founding principles while adapting to the changing landscape and responding to the digital preservation needs of small organizations with limited resources.