MetaArchive Announces New Membership Levels

June 17, 2021

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

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.