September 24, 2018

MetaArchive Members and Staff at iPRES 2018

The premiere international digital preservation conference is happening in Boston this year and of course there are going to be multiple MetaArchive members attending! If you are curious to learn more about MetaArchive one of the best ways is to chat up our current members, so if you are also planning to attend iPRES 2018 keep an eye out for local folks Paige Walker from Boston University, David Mathews from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, as well as Deanna Ulvestad from the Greene County Public Library. Also, Nathan Tallman will be presenting a paper titled, “Approaching Appraisal: Framing criteria for selecting digital content for preservation” with Lauren Work from the University of Virginia at session 308 on Wednesday.

Our Community Manager, Sam Meister , is also attending and moderating Session 202 on Digging into the Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values with representatives from DPN, APTrust, TDL, and COPPUL. He is happy to chat at any time during the event!


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!


August 29, 2017

New member-authored article on digital preservation and failure

We are excited to announce the forthcoming publication of a new article co-authored by Carly Dearborn (Purdue University) and Sam Meister (Educopia/MetaArchive) titled “Failure as process: Interrogating disaster, loss, and recovery in digital preservation”. This article will be published in the upcoming special digital preservation focused issue of Alexandria: The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues In advance of the official release of the article, you can download and read an author accepted version of this article via the Purdue e-pubs repository here.  The authors hope that the article stimulates discussion amongst digital preservation practitioners and welcome any feedback!


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!