News

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.

July 19, 2018

Member Deanna Ulvestad to present at CONTENTdm Users Group Meeting 2018

Deanna Ulvestad, archivist at member institution Greene County Public Library, will be presenting during a panel on “Digital Preservation: Case Studies in Preserving Master Files” at this years’ CONTENTdm Users Group Meeting in Columbus, Ohio on Thursday, August 2nd. Deanna will share her successes implementing workflows to preserve master files with MetaArchive from the perspective of a small institution. If you are planning to attend, and curious to hear more about MetaArchive from a member’s perspective, please stop by and say hello to Deanna!

July 5, 2017

Celebrating over 10 Years of Community-based Digital Preservation

Since 2007, the MetaArchive Cooperative has preserved the digital collections of more than 60 archives, museums, public libraries, and library consortia in Europe, South America, and across the United States. It has done so in a network run by members, for members.

In celebration of our first decade milestone as a membership organization, our community wants to help more organizations – including smaller and under-resourced libraries, archives, and museums – to preserve their content. To further lower the barriers to entry in our community of practice, our members have designed and launched the following:

• A new option (in 2017) to pay a technology fee rather than operating a server node within our preservation network.
• A Collaborative Membership Level that allows many organizations to band together and share their membership costs (see e.g., InDiPres).
• A simplified and streamlined ingest process using BagIt.

For more details, including how to join the MetaArchive Cooperative, please visit our new and improved website at metaarchive.org or contact sam@educopia.org!

June 15, 2017

MetaArchive members to present at ALA 2017

MetaArchive members Cinda May (Indiana State University / InDiPres) and Deanna Ulvestad (Greene County Public Library) will be presenting on Saturday, June 25, 2017 at the Digital Preservation Interest Group meeting at the 2017 American Library Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois. Their talk “Removing Barriers and Building Bridges: The MetaArchive Cooperative Preservation Network’s Flexible Membership Structure” will focus on how the MetaArchive cooperative organizational model has continually evolved to better support the digital preservation needs of smaller organizations. More Details »

April 15, 2017

ETD+ Toolkit Now Available

The ETDplus project team is pleased to announce the public release of the ETD+ Toolkit. Targeting students, faculty, and staff, the ETD+ Toolkit is an approach to improving research output management. Focusing on the ETD as a mile-marker in a student’s research trajectory, it provides in-time advice about how to avoid common digital loss scenarios for the ETD and all of its affiliated files. For more information, including how to use, and how to participate in the pilot please go to : https://educopia.org/publications/etdplustoolkit

February 28, 2017

MetaArchive Cooperative Receives 2017 George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg Award

The MetaArchive Cooperative was bestowed the 2017 George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg Award for its commendable work in the digital preservation field. This award pays tribute to individuals or groups that “foster collaboration for preservation” by demonstrating leadership, vision and initiative to ensure libraries, archives and historical institutions protect cultural patrimony. The MetaArchive Cooperative is an affiliated community of Educopia and a membership owned and operated distributed digital preservation network that safeguards current digital collections so they are available to future generations.

“Since its founding in 2004 MetaArchive has demonstrated leadership and initiative, building collaborative networks to preserve digital collections that capture the richness of our cultural heritage.” said the jury of the George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg Award, “A pioneer and leader in the pursuit of digital preservation, MetaArchive is a community-owned, community-led initiative comprised of libraries, archives, and other digital memory organizations. They have proven resilient and continuously innovative in successfully and sustainably modeled collaborations in service of distributed digital preservation.”

“Our MetaArchive partners are proud to have cooperatively built and maintained a viable solution for preserving digital data for future access, and are delighted to be recognized for this work.” said Rachel Howard, member of MetaArchive’s leadership team and digital initiatives librarian at University of Louisville, “We are proud to carry on George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg’s legacy of cooperative preservation programming.”

The Cunha and Susan Swatzburg Award recognized MetaArchive’s implementation of the Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) open-source software as it’s technical infrastructure.“One of the longest-standing partners of the LOCKSS Program, they now have more than sixty institutions actively preserving digital content.” said the jury of the George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg Award, “MetaArchive has demonstrated the value, feasibility, and success of a distributed model of digital preservation, and continues to evolve to address the needs of a variety of cultural heritage institutions seeking to ensure their collections and materials are preserved over the long term.”

The award, sponsored by Hollinger Metal Edge, and given annually to one recipient is presented during the PARS Preservation Administrator’s Interest Group (PAIG) meeting at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago this June.

January 15, 2017

New Preservation Membership Technology Fee option

As part of its ongoing efforts to lower barriers to membership and participation, the MetaArchive Cooperative Steering Committee is pleased to announce the addition of a new Technology Fee option to the Preservation Membership level. This option allows members to pay an annual technology fee as an alternative to purchasing and maintaining a server storage node within the network. The creation of this option was the result of multiple years of working with members from smaller organizations, such as public libraries and small museums, and experimenting with a variety of storage node infrastructures. Recognizing the limited resources that many small organizations are able to dedicate to digital preservation activities, MetaArchive members have implemented this new Technology Fee option to simplify the process of joining and participating in a distributed digital preservation network. More information, please visit Join Us!

November 15, 2016

Big welcome to new member InDiPres!

The MetaArchive Cooperative is pleased to welcome Indiana Digital Preservation (InDiPres) as our newest Collaborative member. InDiPres is a new organization itself with a mission to “collaboratively manage and sustain a low-cost, secure, and geographically distributed archive for the long term preservation of locally created digital resources in Indiana.” We look forward to working with them and supporting their digital preservation efforts across Indiana! For more information on the Collaborative membership level please check out Join Us!

September 1, 2016

Welcome to new Williams College and Ohio University members!

We are very excited to welcome Williams College and Ohio University as new Preservation members of the MetaArchive Cooperative! As academic libraries, we look to working with them and supporting their efforts to preserve institutional records, born-digital special collections, and research data materials. For more information on the Preservation membership level please check out Join Us!