March 7, 2017

Resources

Documentation

MetaArchive Documentation

  • Cooperative Charter
    Outlines the mission, goals, and organizing principles of the MetaArchive Cooperative; lists membership levels; and details the roles and responsibilities in this evolving collaborative paradigm.
  • Membership Agreement
    Describes the terms of the agreement made between members of the MetaArchive Cooperative.
  • Technical Specifications
    An overview of the current recommendations and requirements for administering a preservation cache for the MetaArchive Cooperative, including staffing and hardware.
  • Governance Procedures
    Detailed description of MetaArchive governance including roles, responsibilities, and terms of leadership and committee groups.
  • MetaArchive Trustworthy Digital Repository Audit
    MetaArchive worked with a contract consultant to carry out a Trusted Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC) self assessment. This checklist report details its conformance and the evidence cited for each criteria addressed.
  • Getting to the Bottom Line: 20 Cost Questions for Digital Preservation
    A list of questions to assist institutions with identifying and comparing short and long-term costs of digital preservation solutions.
  • Digital Preservation Policy Template
    A template to help institutions get started in developing a local digital preservation policy.

Member Workflows

The below workflow maps illustrate the step-by-step processes MetaArchive Cooperative members utilize during their digital curation and preservation activities. These workflows were produced as part of an ongoing project to assist MetaArchive members in documenting the current people, systems, and tools involved in curating and preserving digital content.


March 7, 2017

Events

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March 7, 2017

Join Us

Why Join the MetaArchive Cooperative?

  • Community-based

    Community-based

    Member owned, operated, governed, and driven.

  • Affordable

    Affordable

    Maintain control over the cost of digital preservation. Members review the full price of our preservation work annually and are fully in charge of setting the costs for continued operations.

  • Transparent

    Transparent

    Trust is key. From our software to our community decisions, we are open source all the way.

  • Supportive

    Supportive

    MetaArchive is more than a service, it is an opportunity to learn from other Members and grow in digital preservation capacity in common.

  • Diverse

    Diverse

    All organization types and individuals are welcome. Our current membership includes representatives and practitioners from academic libraries, public libraries, museums, library consortia, and archives.


March 7, 2017

About Us

Mission

The mission of the MetaArchive Cooperative is to engage in sustainable digital preservation through community collaboration.

Vision

Preserving the past, harnessing the present, preparing for the future

Values

  • 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.


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!