News

July 2, 2024

Quarter 2 Report: MetaArchive Transformation Research Team

Executive Summary

The Transition Research Team, composed of leadership from the MetaArchive Community and Educopia, and the LOCKSS Program Team began planning and implementing necessary steps for MetaArchive’s sunset, preservation planning for members, and asset disposition. At the end of the 2nd quarter, planning activities and initial information sharing were completed through weekly meetings, one-on-one member interviews, exploration of new pathway options, and internal and external information sharing. MetaArchive is financially on track to meet the 2024 budget, continuing to inform the sunsetting process.

Major Activities

1. Closed the Community Research Task Force (CRTF) in April to begin planning for MetaArchive’s transformation. For more information on the CRTF see the blog post MetaArchive’s Community Research Task Force is Planning for the Future of the Community.
2. Instated the Transition Research Team (TRT), charged with bringing  together the expertise, perspectives, and efforts of all MetaArchive key stakeholder groups to determine clear, feasible merging/migration/sunsetting pathways for MA members so decisions can be made by the members at end of Q3 2024, and those decisions can be implemented beginning in January 2025.
3. Identified initial pathways to explore, including a full MetaArchive merger, reforming MetaArchive, and individual member adoptions by other PLNs.
4. Hosted Member 1:1s to engage with each member and their representatives to determine individual context, requirements, and potential pathways. Results from these discussions were synthesized and reported back to the MetaArchive community.
5. Hosted open Office Hours for members to meet specifically with MetaArchive Leadership Team members to gain member-to-members insights, feedback, and concerns.

Deliverables

To support open and transparent communication about the processes and decisions from the TRT, we have issued deliverables targeted for member representatives, their supervisors and administrators, and the greater digital preservation and PLN community. 

For Members (internal to MetaArchive Members)

• Monthly one-pagers post Community Calls
• Announcement one-pager for supervisors/admin
• 1:1 Synthesis
• LOCKSS-recommended Matrix (Potential Adoption/Migration Pathways for Individual Members based on mutual needs and geographic region)
• Anonymous Member Feedback Form

For Community

• Blog post 1: MetaArchive Leads PLN Transformation (April 15, 2024)
• Blog post 2: Frequently Asked Questions (May 31, 2024)
• Anonymous Community Feedback Form

3rd Quarter Goals

• Cluster Calls
  Based on the member 1:1s and the subsequent LOCKSS-recommended matrix for individual member adoption by other PLNs, the TRT is coordinating cluster calls with prospective adopters and adoptees. These calls will take place in July 2024 and synthesized results will be reported to the community. Anticipated Completion: August 2024.
• Customized Content Transfer Plans
  The cluster calls will inform the actionable processes and plans for how each member will transfer content out of MetaArchive and to their chosen destination. These plans will be finalized in collaboration with each member and presented to the community. Anticipated Completion: September 10, 2024 Community Call.
• Asset Disposition Mapping
  To ensure smooth transitions, the TRT is reviewing MetaArchive assets, including financial, documentation, platforms, technology, and other business documents, to determine retention, archive, and transfer plans for each asset. Anticipated Completion: August 2024.
• Sunsetting Budget and Plan Revision
  Building on the long-term budget planning from the CRTF, the TRT is revising the sunsetting budget to ensure there are sufficient funds for a year-long sunset plan to better support member needs. Anticipated Completion: August 2024.

Additional questions and comments may be directed to the MetaArchive Leadership Team (ma_leadership@metaarchive.org) or the TRT (ma_trt@educopia.org).

May 30, 2024

MetaArchive Cooperative Transformation: Frequently Asked Questions

General Questions

Context

1. What’s going on with MetaArchive?

MetaArchive Cooperative is undergoing an administrative and technical transformation, because by the end of 2025, MetaArchive will no longer be hosted by Educopia Institute. The Cooperative remains intact as a group, and the data held within its networks remains secure.

In March 2024, we completed the transfer of the technical infrastructure to the LOCKSS Program. LOCKSS will continue to provide technical support to the network and will be instrumental in the transformation process. The Cooperative is convening a Transformation Research Team to bring together the expertise, perspectives, and efforts of key stakeholder groups to determine clear, feasible pathways for MA members. These pathways might include merging with another LOCKSS network, forming one or more new PLNs with different administrative hosts, or migrating members’ content to a geographically/topically/financially relevant PLN of their choice.

2. Why is Educopia no longer hosting the MetaArchive Cooperative?

In March 2024, Educopia completed the first year of a 3-year operational funding investment from the Mellon Foundation.You can read more about Educopia’s Mellon-funded capacity building work here. Educopia is now in the process of making data-informed changes to its business model, changes that will both contribute to greater financial sustainability and respond to the lived experience of staff members that have worked part time on one or more member communities at the same time. 

Beginning January 2025, all member communities hosted by Educopia will have to support 1 Full-time Employee (rather than .5FTE). The impact of this new criteria is very different for each community, as they all have different trajectories– different foundings, activities, and staffing levels over time. For MetaArchive, this new criteria intersects with changes in the information landscape over the 20 years of the Cooperative’s existence, a dip in its Operational Reserve, and on-going questions regarding sustainability. 

For the benefit of all parties involved, MetaArchive will no longer be hosted by Educopia Institute in 2025. Educopia will work closely with MetaArchive and LOCKSS Program staff in 2024 to map out its next phase, i.e., feasible future pathways, by:

• Mapping clear pathways for members: Merging with another PLN; Forming one or more new PLNs with a different administrative host; Migrating member content to an existing private LOCKSS network
• Gathering all of MetaArchive’s historical documentation since its inception
• Ensuring ongoing facilitation and coordination network needs are being met in collaboration with membership and LOCKSS Program staff, until Jackson Huang returns in July
• Consultation and project management while participating directly in the Transformation research (until the end of Q3 2024)
• Communications planning and support to Leadership and the Membership & Outreach Committee: Community-wide informational resources as well as public communications

3. What will Educopia focus on next?

Educopia continues to mature, grow, and change guided by its new Vision and Mission Statements. With explicit descriptions of fiscal hosting criteria, services, and fees coming soon to our website, Educopia will continue to provide fiscal sponsorship to groups and projects focusing on knowledge production, knowledge preservation, and knowledge sharing. We hope to expand our fiscal sponsorship portfolio, centering projects and initiatives that reduce knowledge inequities. Educopia will also continue to grow its consulting portfolio and pursue collaborative research projects that inform field-level understanding in organizational development and cultivation of diverse knowledge communities; collaborative knowledge production and publishing; digital preservation and curation; and community-controlled infrastructure. 

4. What happened to the IMLS Implementation grant proposal?

The rationale behind the IMLS Implementation grant proposal was a one-time infusion of capital to cover the cost of a full time Community Facilitator that would work closely with members and the LOCKSS team to improve ingest workflows and the overall usability of the network as a prerequisite to new member recruitment. Additionally, the capital would subsidize service and storage costs associated with LOCKSS Program and Internet Archive partnerships—both of which aimed at lowering the barrier to entry for cultural organizations to participate in the network.

While the transition was initiated and grant writing continued, MetaArchive lost two additional members, bringing the projected 2024 operational reserve to $14,000 below the target, according to the community’s operational reserve policy.

After completing numerous detailed financial and member recruitment projections, the Task Force members determined that even with hoped-for grant funding ($250,000 over three years), there was a high probability that MetaArchive would have to sunset at some point during the grant project, due the projected drain of operational reserve funds.

While the Community Research Task Force named the need for 1FTE of central staffing support in 2023, in February 2024, Educopia announced criteria for all member communities to be able to support 1FTE by 2025. This requirement, combined with the dip in operational reserve, initiated the Transformation process. 

5. Will MetaArchive still be an Educopia Community?

Once members have been provided with all possible pathways (no later than the end of Q3 2024) so they can make an informed decision, implementation of said member decisions will begin by or before January 2025. Once all members have transitioned their data to their chosen digital preservation pathway, MetaArchive will no longer be affiliated with Educopia. 

The Community Research Task Force

1. What happened to the Community Research Task Force (CRTF)?

At the end of its second decade of operations, the Cooperative formed a Community Research Task Force with the intention of going beyond business-as-usual to “do things differently to get the long term success we are all working towards”. Convening weekly for over a year, the Task Force researched, documented, presented information, and made recommendations to broader membership, enabling them to make evidence-based decisions regarding MetaArchive’s strategic directions.

Starting April 10th, the Community Research Task Force wound down, as it had completed its original charge. This group was reformed as the Transformation Research Team, composed of Educopia staff, Stanford/LOCKSS Program staff, and MetaArchive Community members.

The Transformation Research Team

1. What is the Transformation Research Team (TRT)?

MetaArchive convened a Transformation Research Team to bring together the expertise, perspectives, and efforts of key stakeholder groups to determine clear, feasible pathways for MA members. The TRT is composed of Educopia staff (Brandon Locke, Jessica Meyerson, Aloma Antao, Jackson Huang), Stanford/LOCKSS Program staff (Clay Miller, Thib Guicherd-Callin, Snowden Becker), and MetaArchive Community members (Christine Wiseman, Reid Boehm, Hannah Pryor, Alex Kinneman, Zach Vowell, Shanna Smith). The charge of this Research Team will include:

• Calls with PLNs on governance, costs, and potential partnerships
• Mapping out cache-to-cache migration, including pathways, timelines, and costs
• Calls and member office hours with members that may want to create a new PLN, providing pathways, timelines, and costs
• Creating a clear migration plan and timeline for members that may want to migrate their content to an existing PLN or alternative bit-level digital preservation service in 2025
• Providing all possible pathways to members no later than the end of Q3 2024 so they can make an informed decision
• Implementation of member decisions begins January 2025

Future Pathways

Options

1. What are my options as a member?

The options available to members are a work-in-progress. As the work of the Transformation Research Team progresses (mapping MA members’ needs and their constraints to available LOCKSS alternatives, and documenting the timeline and resourcing needed to implement each option presented during the April 9th Community Call), we are narrowing the options and specifying the actions involved to implement them. Currently:

Off the table (as of 5/20/2024) due to variables including constraints of capacity and the timeframe for transformation:
A. Merging as a whole with an existing PLN
B. Reforming as a new PLN with a new admin host

Options that can be implemented within the specified timeframe for MA’s Transformation:
A. Some MA members are adopted by other LOCKSS PLNs
B. Some MA members identify a non-LOCKSS solution (If there are members that choose a non-LOCKSS-based solution and they currently have data stored in LOCKSS nodes hosted by other members, there will be technical assistance provided to ensure the relocation of all preserved content). The TRT is also going to compile a decisionmaking resource for members to evaluate non-LOCKSS digital preservation solutions.

Options that may take longer than the specified timeframe for MA’s Transformation*:
A. MA splits into smaller networks [different admin host, different monetary/billing aspects, based on geography, common content needs, or ingest size (e.g., 100TB v. 1TB)]
B. Some MA members establish a new PLN among themselves and/or with partners not currently in MA

*While these options may take longer than the specified timeframe for MA’s Transformation, the TRT still plans to undertake research and documentation activities that will serve members who may want to pursue these longer-term options after MetaArchive’s Transformation is complete.

2. How much input and agency will the member institutions have to define and select options?

MA leadership, Educopia, and LOCKSS (TRT members) hold context regarding which options will be possible with available capacity in the specific timeframe for the Transformation. Given this, the TRT will provide a clear presentation of which options we think would best serve each member given their particular digital preservation needs (based on member 1:1s and follow-ups with individual members), thus enabling member organizations to make informed decisions. All members will ultimately determine for themselves whether the LOCKSS solutions recommended to them are the solution they want to pursue.

3. What if my institution cannot find an option that works?

In addition to matching current members’ digital preservation needs to existing or new LOCKSS-based solutions, the TRT is also going to compile a decisionmaking resource for members to evaluate non-LOCKSS digital preservation solutions. All members will ultimately determine for themselves whether the LOCKSS solutions recommended to them are the solution they want to pursue. There are likely to be one or more members that do not have a clear match with a current LOCKSS solution. Those members will have to determine whether they want to select a non-LOCKSS digital preservation solution, or to pause preservation activities until they select a new solution.

If there are members that choose a non-LOCKSS-based solution and they currently have data stored in LOCKSS nodes hosted by other members, there will be technical assistance provided to ensure the relocation of all preserved content.

4. When will we have a clearer picture of plans and options for 2025?

While members of the TRT will follow up with individual members and smaller groups of MA members that share the same digital preservation needs in order to gather additional information between now and September, the goal is for all MA members to have a clear picture of their plans for 2025 by the September Community Call.

For Members

Invoicing & Contracts

1. How will I be billed for 2024? And will fees change?

Invoicing will continue on your institution’s normal billing cycle.
All invoices from now until the end of 2024 will be the same amount as your previous invoice.

2. What about 2025?

Invoices in 2025 will be prorated so that you’ll only be paying through Dec 31, 2025.
We will send storage invoices in early 2025 (for 2024 storage) and late 2025 (for 2025 storage).

3. Why does MetaArchive encourage members to renew for 1 year??

• The Transformation Process was triggered once MA dipped below the sunsetting budget reflected in the community-approved Operational Reserve Policy. The Operational Reserve Policy was approved and put in place in 2023 in anticipation of a potential sunsetting of the network at that time. While MA’s projected Operational Reserve at the end of 2024 is below the sunsetting budget, those funds are required to resource the Transformation and to pay for ongoing network services in the meantime (assuming members renew their membership agreement and pay their invoices through 2025).
• The truth is that we do not know with certainty what the full costs of completing this process will be. In addition to the normal operating budget items like staff and overhead, we anticipate a number of unknown, one-time costs associated with the Transformation.
• Thus, it’s crucial that we continue to have revenue in 2025 for the Transformation to be successful (appropriately resourced, well documented, thoughtfully implemented). If there are remaining funds when the process is completed in 2025, the community determines what they would like Educopia to do (e.g., transfer funds to new fiscal host; or donate remaining funds to a digipres conference scholarship fund).

4. Who do I contact with billing and invoicing questions?

Please feel free to contact either of MetaArchive’s Interim Community Facilitators:
Brandon Locke <brandon@educopia.org>
Jessica Meyerson <jessica@educopia.org>

5. Will ingests continue in 2024 and/or 2025?

Ingests will be on pause during Q2 of 2024. For Q3-Q4, members with functioning workflows and regular content ingests into MetaArchive may choose to continue ingests as usual. Members with broken plug-ins, older content, or other workflow issues may choose to focus on AU quality control and ideal packaging workflows. Upon their return in July, MA Community Facilitator Jackson Huang will work closely with each member to identify appropriate next steps for their specific needs.

Ingesting more content in the network, and storing one copy on the Stanford node, could help to ensure smoother cache-to-cache migration for members that are likely to move forward with a LOCKSS-based solution. However, if some members think they are likely to move ahead with a non-LOCKSS-based solution, it may not make sense to ingest additional content into the network.

Committees

1. I’m on a MetaArchive committee. How will this affect our work?

Committee work continues in 2024 as planned. Some of the activities described in the 2024 committee action plans have been re-oriented to support the Transformation process.

2. Who is my liaison to the TRT?

Alex Kinnaman is TRT liaison to the Outreach and Member Services Committee
Zach Vowell is the TRT liaison to the Technical Committee
Shanna Smith is the TRT liaison to the Documentation Committee
Christine Wiseman and Reid Boehm are liaisons to the Leadership Committee

Ongoing Support

1. Where do I go if I have questions?

Members have several resources for addressing their questions and concerns:

• Email <ma_trt@educopia.org> If you have a question for the Transformation Research Team (which includes representatives from MA membership, Educopia, and the LOCKSS Program)
• Email MA Leadership Chair, Christine Wiseman at <cwiseman@auctr.edu> or MA Leadership Chair Elect, Reid Boehm at <riboehm@purdue.edu> if you have a question specific to MA Leadership
• Email MA Treasurer and Chair of Outreach & Member Services Committee, Alex Kinneman at <alexk93@vt.edu>, if you have questions about the MA Operating Budget or information sharing about the Transformation
• Email Educopia Co-Director <jessica@educopia.org> if you have questions about Educopia’s changes to membership community fiscal hosting criteria or questions about Educopia more broadly.
• Email MetaArchive’s Interim Community Facilitators, Brandon Locke at <brandon@educopia.org>and Jessica Meyerson at <jessica@educopia.org>

2. What technical support will I have?

The LOCKSS team and the Technical Committee are available to provide technical support throughout the Transformation process. When Jackson Huang, MetaArchive’s Community Facilitator, returns in July 2024, they will also be available to provide hands-on technical support to members.

Technical support from the LOCKSS Program staff may include node maintenance, AU quality control, transfer of content into a node and/or out to the Stanford node, migrating a node from the MetaArchive network to a different LOCKSS network, and more.

The LOCKSS technical support team can be contacted by emailing <lockss-support@lockss.org>

The MetaArchive Technical Committee can be contacted by emailing <ma_technical@metaarchive.org>.

3. Will Educopia still be involved in the process for any chosen option?

Yes, Educopia will be part of the process for members’ chosen options. The role Educopia plays in the process will depend on the option that each member selects.

As the fiscal host for MetaArchive since 2006, Educopia will work with membership to determine an archival repository for MetaArchive’s organizational records – the transfer of records to an archival repository would only take place after the Transformation process is completed in 2025. Educopia will also be involved in the disbursement or transfer of any funds remaining in the MetaArchive account after the Transformation process is completed.

Communication & Feedback Mechanisms

1. How will the community be updated about progress made?

There are several channels for information about MetaArchive’s Transformation process:

• Monthly Community Calls
• Member 1-pagers
• The MetaArchive Blog
• MA Member Office Hours

2. Where do I go if I have feedback?

• Email <ma_trt@educopia.org> ff you have feedback for the Transformation Research Team (which includes representatives from MA membership, Educopia, and the LOCKSS Program)
• Email MA Leadership Chair, Christine Wiseman at <cwiseman@auctr.edu> or MA Leadership Chair Elect, Reid Boehm at <riboehm@purdue.edu> if you have a feedback specific to MA Leadership
• Email Chair of Outreach & Member Services Committee, Alex Kinneman at <alexk93@vt.edu>, if you have feedback about member communications
• Email Educopia Co-Director <jessica@educopia.org> if you have feedback about Educopia’s changes to membership community fiscal hosting criteria or for Educopia more broadly.
• Email MetaArchive’s Interim Community Facilitators, Brandon Locke at <brandon@educopia.org>and Jessica Meyerson at <jessica@educopia.org> if you have feedback about ongoing scheduling, coordination, and facilitation of the network.

For the Field

Impact

1. How might this impact other PLNs?

Other PLNs may be directly impacted by the transformation in the following ways:

• Other PLNs may bring one or more of the current MA members on board as new members of their network.This will require migrating the data that is currently preserved in MA’s network and integrating it into the new network, a fairly straightforward process. For networks with similar structures for membership and storage fees, the net difference may be minimal for migrating MA members, and a modest gain for the other PLNs that bring them on board (which may also gain additional geographic and administrative diversity with new members).
• If new PLNs arise as a result of the MA transformation, this may represent some opportunities for recruitment of new members to multiple PLNs (for example, a newly created regional network might offer pricing incentives for members that also are, or become, members of the GLN, CLOCKSS, USDocs, etc.)
• Other PLNs may also be indirectly impacted in one or more ways. For instance, the factors that contributed to MA’s changing status may also affect similar communities, which is why MetaArchive is committed to regular community and public reporting on this transformation in the hopes that this documentation will serve as a valuable contribution to the ongoing evolution of the digital preservation services landscape.

April 15, 2024

MetaArchive Leads PLN Transformation

In Summary:

In 2025, MetaArchive will experience a major transition. No longer hosted by Educopia Institute beyond the coming year, the Cooperative will work with Educopia and LOCKSS to navigate administrative and technical transformation—a new phase for the long running PLN.

• MetaArchive Cooperative is undergoing an administrative and technical transformation, because by the end of 2025, MetaArchive will no longer be hosted by Educopia Institute.
• In March 2024, we completed the transfer of the technical infrastructure to the LOCKSS Program. LOCKSS will continue to provide technical support to the network and will be instrumental in the transformation process.
• The Cooperative remains intact as a group, and the data held within its networks remains secure. 
• The Cooperative is convening a Transformation Research Team to bring together the expertise, perspectives, and efforts of key stakeholder groups to determine clear, feasible pathways for MA members.
• Emergent strategies and lessons learned during MetaArchive’s evaluation and evidence-based decision making processes will be shared transparently with the broader PLN community, so that they may serve as a learning resource for peer organizations striving for sustainable digital preservation through community collaboration.

Founded in 2004, the MetaArchive Cooperative has been consistently defining what it entails to be a digital preservation network created and hosted by and for memory organizations. As a member-governed cooperative, it has also been discovering and documenting what it takes to sustain a decentralized, risk-mitigating digital preservation storage network. 

A lot has changed in the 20 years of MetaArchive’s existence—in the broader economic environment, in the knowledge landscape and digital preservation field, and within the Cooperative itself. As a result, the Cooperative is facing challenges to sustainability that necessitate a change for the network from its current form.

Now that the network has dipped below the draft sunsetting budget outlined in its Operational Reserve Policy(1), MetaArchive will work closely with Educopia and LOCKSS Program staff in 2024 to map out its next phase, i.e., feasible future pathways. These pathways might include merging with another LOCKSS network, forming one or more new PLNs with different administrative hosts, or migrating members’ content to a geographically/topically/financially relevant PLN of their choice.

Just as MetaArchive was the first and longest running Private LOCKSS Network, it will continue to build on its legacy of field-level leadership in the digital preservation space by completing an intentional and well-coordinated transformation that is mindful, efficient, and done with integrity—demonstrating to all digital preservation stakeholders that endings should be handled with the same attention, investment, and care as beginnings.  

Links to mitigation strategies: SuperNode Pilot Project, Change for Continuing Impact, Project Mycelium, Launching CRTF and LOCKSS Transition

Considerations and Conclusions: Recent Mitigation Efforts 



At the end of its second decade of operations, the Cooperative formed a Community Research Task Force with the intention of going beyond business-as-usual to “do things differently to get the long term success we are all working towards”. Convening weekly for over a year, the Task Force researched, documented, presented information, and made recommendations to broader membership, enabling them to make evidence-based decisions regarding MetaArchive’s strategic directions. These recommendations resulted in several major community decisions:

• Approving the Operational Reserve policy and sunsetting budget
• Voting to remain an independent network while pursuing a partnership for technical infrastructure support
• Voted to partner with the LOCKSS Program at Stanford, transitioning much of the network’s technical infrastructure to Stanford

In a joint statement from CRTF members Christine Wiseman, Reid Boehm, Shanna Smith, Zach Vowell, and Alex Kinnaman earlier this week:

“The work undertaken by the CRTF (May 2023 – April 2024) resulted in a clearer understanding of specific areas of technical improvement, peer network contingency planning, and the unique positioning of MetaArchive in the broader digital preservation landscape. Our changing partnership with Educopia and subsequent infrastructure changes coupled with our new collaboration with the LOCKSS Program illuminated the need for change, guiding MetaArchive into a period of transformation.”

Planning a Deliberative Transformation:
Appropriately Resourced, Well Documented, Thoughtfully Implemented

The technical transition to the LOCKSS Program has involved an important investment of staff and member time, as it is essential to ensure the success of any merger or migration of member content. While the migration to LOCKSS begins to address MetaArchive’s technical needs, the partnership has also underscored the need for specific technical improvements that needed to support a sustainable, functioning digital preservation infrastructure, including a streamlined ingest process, community staging alternative for members, consistent processes for cache upgrades, cache monitoring and recovery, AU quality control, and AU reporting and clean-up.

“The fact that, over the last six months, the transition of MetaArchive technical services to the LOCKSS Program contributed to the acceleration of a need for MetaArchive to restructure, is a feature, not a bug,” Thib Guicherd-Callin, Program Manager of the LOCKSS Program, said on Monday. “Taking stock of MetaArchive’s collective needs and interpolating them with the digital preservation landscape at individual MetaArchive institutions richly informs the future partnerships that will emerge as MetaArchive goes through a transformation 20 years in the making.”

Next Steps

Starting April 10th, the Community Research Task Force will wind down, as it has completed its original charge. This group will reform as a Transformation Research Team composed of Educopia staff, Stanford/LOCKSS Program staff, and MetaArchive Community members. The charge of this Research Team will include:

• Calls with PLNs on governance, costs, and potential partnerships
• Mapping out cache-to-cache migration, including pathways, timelines, and costs
• Calls with members that may want to create a new PLN, providing pathways, timelines, and costs
• Creating a clear migration plan and timeline for members that may want to migrate their content to an existing PLN or alternative bit-level digital preservation service in 2025 
• Providing all possible pathways to members no later than the end of Q3 2024 so they can make an informed decision
• Implementation of member decisions begins January 2025 

Roles and responsibilities for members of the Transformation Research Team are as follows:

1. Community Members (Christine Wiseman, Reid Boehm, Hannah Pryor, Alex Kinneman, Zach Vowell, Shanna Smith)

• Ensuring that member needs are being met and questions are being answered
• Holding member “office hours” every other week (starting May) to discuss questions as they arise 
• Working closely with Educopia and LOCKSS Program staff on clear pathways for members:
  • Merging with another PLN
  • Forming one or more new PLNs with a different administrative host
  • Migrating member content to an existing private LOCKSS network

2. Educopia Staff (Brandon Locke, Jessica Meyerson, Aloma Antao, Jackson Huang)

• Gathering all of MetaArchive’s historical documentation since its inception
• Ensuring ongoing facilitation and coordination network needs are being met in collaboration with membership and LOCKSS Program staff, until Jackson Huang returns in July
• Now–end of Q3: Consultation and project management while participating directly in the Transformation research  
• Communications planning and support to Leadership and the Membership & Outreach Committee: Community-wide informational resources as well as public communications

3. LOCKSS Program Staff (Clay Miller, Thib Guicherd-Callin, Snowden Becker)

• Participating in research on clear pathways for members:
  • Merging with another PLN
  • Forming one or more new PLNs with a different administrative host
  • Migrating member content to an existing private LOCKSS network
• Guidance and advice on technical aspects of the Transformation
• Ongoing 1:1 member technical support for those who are:
  • Testing their ingest workflows
  • Completing server upgrades to prevent cache losses
  • Engaged in AU troubleshooting and migration
  • Performing assessment and clean-up of existing content for quality control and ease of migration

If you have questions regarding this transformation, you can reach the MetaArchive Transformation Research Team at ma_trt@educopia.org, or you can submit anonymized questions to this form. All members of the Transformation Research team will be notified when new questions are submitted, and these questions will be addressed to the best of our ability in monthly MetaArchive Community Calls.

Responses to relevant questions may also be added to an evolving FAQ, which will be hosted on the MetaArchive website. These FAQs will serve both as a reference for members of our network, as well as a learning resource for peer organizations in the field. The Transformation Research Team is committed to regular community and public reporting on this transformation in the hopes that this documentation will serve as a valuable contribution to the ongoing evolution of the digital preservation services landscape.

(1) MetaArchive’s operational reserve policy is based on looking at current annual expenditures combined with projected one-time costs to facilitate a deliberative and graceful transformation (be that merging with another network or migrating individual member content to other services of their choosing).

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

Alex Kinnaman

Digital Preservation Coordinator, Virginia Tech

Running for: Treasurer

Candidate Statement

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

Christine Wiseman

Head of the Digital Services Department, AUC Woodruff Library

Running for: Chair-Elect

Candidate Statement

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.