PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

Plan for the National Digital Information

Infrastructure and Preservation Program

A Collaborative Initiative of the Library of Congress
First Printing, October 2002
iii

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

What Is at Stake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

The NDIIPP Legislation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Fact-Finding and Initial Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Consultation with Stakeholders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

 National Digital Strategy Advisory Board . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

 Stakeholder Meetings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Background Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

 Surveying the Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

 Defining Components of the Digital Preservation Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17

 Leveraging Federal Research Investments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Scenario Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Digital Preservation Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Planning Outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

The State of Digital Preservation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Challenges of Collecting and Preserving Digital Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

 Current Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

 Transforming Content

 E-BOOKS AND E-JOURNALS

 DIGITAL SOUND RECORDINGS

 DIGITAL TELEVISION AND VIDEO

Contents
ivPRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

 WEB SITES

 OTHER MEDIA

 Transforming Roles

 WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?

 WHO PAYS?

Current Digital Preservation Efforts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

 U.S. Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

 U.S. Libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

 Private Sector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

 International Libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Implications for the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Future Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Plausible Scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

NDIIPP Strategic Direction and Plans for Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Strategic Direction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Development of the Digital Preservation Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

 Core Capacities of the Digital Preservation Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

 Selection and Collection Development

 Intellectual Property

 Business Models

 Standards and Best Practices

 Communication and Outreach

 Digital Preservation Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

NDIIPP Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Management of the Initial NDIIPP Investment Portfolio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

Initial Investment Portfolio Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Basic Investment Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Investment Categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

 Practical Applications and Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

 Digital Preservation Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

 Basic Preservation Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

Funding Mechanisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

Project Solicitation, Selection, and Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

 Solicitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

 Selection Criteria for Initial Investment Portfolio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

 Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
vPLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

Preserving Our Digital Heritage—Appendices

Appendix 1. Consultation with Concerned Stakeholder Communities . . . . . . . . . 1

Appendix 2. Building a National Strategy for Digital Preservation: 

Issues in Digital Media Archiving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Previously published in April 2002 by the Council on Library and Information 

Resources and the Library of Congress

 Preface

 DEANNA MARCUM AND LAURA CAMPBELL

 Summary of Findings

 AMY FRIEDLANDER

 Preserving Digital Periodicals

 DALE FLECKER

 E-Books and the Challenge of Preservation

 FRANK ROMANO

 Archiving the World Wide Web

PETER LYMAN

 Preservation of Digitally Recorded Sound

 SAMUEL BRYLAWSKI

 Understanding the Preservation Challenge of Digital Television

 MARY IDE, DAVE MACCARN, THOM SHEPARD, AND LEAH WEISSE

 Digital Video Archives: Managing Through Metadata

 HOWARD D. WACTLAR AND MICHAEL G. CHRISTEL 

Appendix 3. Digital Preservation in the United States: 

Survey of Current Research, Practice, and Common Understandings . . . . . . . 111

DANIEL GREENSTEIN AND ABBY SMITH

Appendix 4. Council on Library and Information Resources 

Survey on Digital Archiving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

DALE FLECKER

Appendix 5. National Digital Preservation Initiatives: 

An Overview of Developments in Australia, France, the Netherlands, 

and the United Kingdom and Related International Activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

NEIL BEAGRIE 

Appendix 6. Copyright Issues Relevant to the Creation of a Digital Archive: 

A Preliminary Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

JUNE M. BESEK
viPRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

Appendix 7. It’s About Time: Research Challenges in Digital Archiving 

and Long-Term Preservation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205

MARGARET HEDSTROM, SHARON DAWES, CARL FLEISCHHAUER, 

JAMES GRAY, CLIFFORD LYNCH, VICTOR MCCRARY, REAGAN MOORE, 

KENNETH THIBODEAU, AND DONALD WATERS

Appendix 8. Highlights of the Library of Congress’s Scenario Learning Process 

on the Future of Digital Preservation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

CHRIS ERTEL AND CHRIS COLDEWEY 

Appendix 9. Preliminary Architecture Proposal for Long-Term 

Digital Preservation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

CLAY SHIRKY

Appendix 10. Criteria for Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
vii

Preface

The Library of Congress and the research community owe a great debt of

thanks to the U.S. Congress for so generously funding this initial plan for preserving digital materials. This support continues Congress’s long tradition of conserving 

through its library one of America’s greatest resources: the extraordinary creative 

record of our citizens. 

Our people have long benefited from Congressional legislation that has enabled the 

Library of Congress to acquire, preserve, and make available the memory of this great 

nation. Through the Copyright Act of 1870, the television, film, and sound recording preservation acts, and, most recently, the Veterans History Project, Congress has 

anticipated and met the challenge of preserving America’s cultural heritage in its 

many forms.

Now Congress has asked the Library to develop a plan to make sure that digital materials can be preserved for our national information reserve. The new digital technology offers great promise, but it also creates an unprecedented surfeit of data in an 

unstable and ephemeral environment. Forty-four percent of the sites available on the 

Internet in 1998 were no longer in existence a year later, and the average life of a Web 

site is now only 44 days. 

Congress has understood that systematically capturing and preserving digital materials that are important for our nation and that represent our culture is a critical task 

that their Library is uniquely suited to lead.

During this fact-finding and initial planning period, the Library has met with hundreds of potential partners and stakeholders in America’s private and public sectors. 

We have listened, learned, and developed a collaborative plan for action, which we 

present to you herewith. 

James H. Billington

The Librarian of Congress

1

Executive Summary

Digital technology is radically transforming the ways that we create and

disseminate information. This new technology has spawned a surfeit of information 

that is extremely fragile, inherently impermanent, and difficult to assess for long-term 

value. The technology has enabled and encouraged many creators: It is possible for 

everyone to be his or her own publisher on the Web, in large part because it is not 

filtered for content or quality, as traditional modes of publishing have been. Digital 

formats are no sooner created than they are superseded by others. As a result, it is 

increasingly difficult for libraries to identify what is of value, to acquire it, and to 

ensure its longevity over time. 

Never has access to information that is authentic, reliable, and complete been more 

important, and never has the capacity of libraries and other heritage institutions to 

guarantee that access been in greater jeopardy. Recognizing the value that the preservation of past knowledge has played in the creativity and innovation of the nation, 

the U.S. Congress seeks, through the Library of Congress, to find solutions to the 

challenges posed by capturing and preserving digital information of cultural and 

social significance.

The NDIIPP Legislation

In December 2000, the United States Congress passed legislation establishing the 

National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). It 

charges the Librarian of Congress to lead a nationwide planning effort for the longterm preservation of digital content, as well as to capture current digital content that 

is at risk of disappearing. The conference report for the legislation urges the Library 

to work jointly with key government agencies—the Department of Commerce, the 

White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the National Archives 

and Records Administration—and with those entities with expertise in the collection 
2PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

and maintenance of archives of digital materials—the National Library of Medicine, 

the National Agricultural Library, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Research Libraries Group, the OCLC Online Computer Library Center, and 

the Council on Library and Information Resources—as well as with the wide group of 

private sector institutions working in digital formats. 

Fact-Finding and Initial Planning

The goal of the plan for digital preservation is to encourage shared responsibility for 

digital content and to seek national solutions for:

• the continuing collection, selection, and organization of the most historically significant cultural materials and of important information resources, regardless of 

evolving formats,

• the long-term storage, preservation, and authenticity of those collections, and

• persistent, rights-protected access for the public to the digital heritage of the 

American people.

In carrying out the NDIIPP mandate, the Library established a learning process in 

which each stage is informed and shaped by those that come before. The process 

began with a yearlong, nationwide, fact-finding effort and initial planning. Next, with 

Congressional approval, NDIIPP will invest in a set of activities proposed under 

the plan that include: practical applications and modeling of key components of the 

digital preservation infrastructure; developing core capacities for the preservation 

network; building a digital preservation architecture; and conducting targeted basic 

research needed for the management of digital content and of the systems that support it. These investments will both leverage the knowledge gained by a range of preservation stakeholders and broaden their participation in network building.

This document is the culmination of the initial research and planning phase. It 

represents the fruits of intensive consultations with a wide range of American and 

international innovators, creators, and high-level managers of digital information in 

the private and public sectors. This document reports on the planning approach and 

on what has been learned from a variety of activities. It proposes a strategy that, as it 

moves forward, will be continually scrutinized and refined to keep current with the 

rapid and unpredictable developments of technology, of the legal and rights regime 

governing digital content, and of the economic and security uncertainties of our time. 

In order to respond to this NDIIPP mandate, the Library of Congress embarked on 

planning through four major activities: 

• consultation with stakeholders, 

• background research, 

• scenario planning, and

• defining components of the digital preservation infrastructure.
3PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

In addition to these activities, the Library has begun to capture culturally and historically significant digital information before it can disappear, as also mandated by Congress. This includes capture of Web-based information that documents contemporary 

events, as well as multi-media materials, sites that exemplify the extraordinary range 

of creativity—both of new content and of new modes of distribution—that the Web 

has spawned.

The consultation with the stakeholders began with the establishment of a 27-

member high-level advisory group, the National Digital Strategy Advisory Board. 

This was followed by a series of national stakeholder meetings that brought together 

people representing: professional associations; entertainment, film, music, radio, 

commercial and noncommercial broadcasting; higher education; libraries, museums, 

nonprofit organizations, foundations and cultural institutions; newspaper, magazine, 

book and textbook publishing, scholarly journals; and software, Web design, and 

development. There were also interviews with a variety of experts in a number of 

relevant fields designed to elicit opinions and advice on what a national digital preservation infrastructure should accomplish and how it could be designed, built, and 

maintained.

These sessions brought together communities that seldom, if ever, meet—in large part 

because they lack a neutral forum in which to discuss common concerns. The meetings established some baseline areas of consensus on: 

• the need for the national preservation initiative, NDIIPP, 

• the need for a distributed or decentralized solution,

• the need for more research into the technologies for digital preservation, and 

• the recognition that technology is an important part of the solution within the 

broad context of social, legal, and economic issues.

The sessions also surfaced priorities for action or research on: 

• intellectual property and liability issues, 

• scope of collecting, that is, what is preserved by whom, for whom, and in what 

forms, 

• understanding better who the users are and will be, 

• developing sustainable economic models for preservation, and 

• balancing the interests of preservation and access. 

All agreed that these problems are urgent; that action is needed now, not some time 

in the future; and that everyone—from creators to custodians—must contribute to 

the solution and learn to operate fluently in a world of constant and unpredictable 

change. The stakeholders identified the Library of Congress as an important organization in bringing resolution to a number of these issues in playing a central role as 

convener and facilitator of collaborative solutions.

Background research included in-depth surveys of American and international 

libraries and their digital preservation programs; a review of how federal agencies 
4PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

are responding to the challenge of preserving digital information and records; six indepth studies on new media and the challenges they present to digital preservation; 

an overview of the impact of current copyright legislation on the right of a library 

or other collecting institution to preserve digital content; and defining the roles, 

responsibilities, functions, and services that comprise key elements of the preservation network. In partnership with the National Science Foundation, the Library also 

convened experts in digital libraries, systems development, and computer science to 

articulate a research agenda for digital preservation.

This research revealed that a significant number of public and private institutions 

agree not only on the problems of preserving digital content, but also on the best 

approaches to developing common solutions through collaborative actions. It also 

revealed the consensus need for the Library to act as convener and honest broker to 

bring together the many participants in preservation to clarify their respective roles 

and responsibilities, coordinate activities, and address such issues as selection, intellectual property, and technical standards, among many.

Scenario planning brought together a number of stakeholders, from creators, 

publishers and distributors, digital librarians, computer scientists, archivists and 

librarians, to consider the impact that key driving forces may have in the future development of the digital preservation infrastructure. The resulting views into possible 

futures informed later thinking about how to develop the network of partners and 

technology components to enable digital preservation. 

Defining components of the digital preservation infrastructure began with describing the types of roles, responsibilities, functions, and services that may be present in 

such an infrastructure and identifying all the key elements necessary for it to operate. 

The critical actors are new and existing services and technologies that shape the context of digital preservation and that must be considered when designing a reliable and 

scalable infrastructure.

What most distinguishes the digital preservation context from the analog one now 

in place for libraries, archives, museums, and other heritage institutions is the sheer 

scale of it. It comprehends vastly larger amounts of information created in a greater 

variety of formats and distributed in new venues to a broader and more heterogeneous user base. This complex environment demands an infrastructure that will: 

• support the needs of multiple communities over long periods of time,

• respond to rapidly changing technologies and innovative behaviors, and

• be transparent and trustworthy.
5PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

Strategic Direction and Plans for Action

The vision of NDIIPP is to ensure the access over time to a rich body of digital 

content through the establishment of a national network of committed partners, collaborating in a digital preservation architecture with defined roles and 

responsibilities. 

The creation of such a system will occur incrementally, because of the complexity of 

the challenge and the number and diversity of actors involved. To realize this vision, 

the Library of Congress will take actions that are: 

• catalytic: investing in existing strengths, leveraging public and private investments, and stimulating research and development where needed,

• collaborative: engaging willing partners and key stakeholders in areas of mutual 

interest and expertise,

• iterative: learning from the initial planning and fact-finding to inform subsequent 

actions and investments, and continuing to feed results back into the chain of 

research, testing, and development, and

• strategic: addressing a broad spectrum of issues in technology, collection development, infrastructure and organization, intellectual property, technical standards, 

and other key components of the preservation network through a balance of early 

short-term and long-term actions and investments.

To begin building the preservation infrastructure, the Library proposes a strategy for 

working on the two key components that support it: developing a network of participants and building the technical framework. 

Working with partners in the public and private sectors, including the National Science Foundation, the Library will invest in projects that develop core capacities of 

the infrastructure in the following areas: 

Selection and Collection Development

Among the collaborative actions in the area of selection and collection development 

to be undertaken are:

• developing cooperative agreements between national libraries about the scope of 

collecting national materials, both Web-based and licensed, 

• developing cooperative collecting agreements with libraries, archives, and other 

collecting institutions in the public and private sectors, 

• convening experts to develop guidelines for assessing content for enduring value, 

• convening experts to examine curatorial best practices for selecting dynamic 

objects, such as Web-based journals, GIS materials, interactive objects, and other 

genres,

• defining the boundaries of Web-based content for preservation purposes, and 
6PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

• reviewing collection development policies, including those for best edition necessary for mandatory copyright deposit, in order to bring them up to date for digital 

materials.

Intellectual Property

Recommended actions include:

• investigation of the options and authorities necessary for the Library of Congress 

to preserve digital content captured on the Internet,

• development of acceptable methods of access to digital content for educational 

purposes within a library setting,

• investigation of the implications of mandatory deposit for digital content,

• investigation of the implications of various security and protection devices for 

preservation, and 

• development of a better understanding of the international context of copyright, 

jurisdiction, responsibility, and reach of applicable law, possibly in cooperation 

with other national libraries and multinational publishing and media industries.

Business Models

Among actions in the area of business models to be undertaken are:

• identification of incentives for institutions to undertake preservation,

• identification of incentives for creators to deposit content, 

• development of metrics for costs and benefits of digital preservation, 

• development of metrics for appraising digital works for purposes of insurance and 

tax, and 

• development of model safe-harbor agreements for those materials that are preserved by commercial entities or others that may not be best positioned to ensure 

longevity. 

Standards and Best Practices

Activities that the Library will continue or initiate are:

• coordinating and documenting standards that support key preservation services, 

such as metadata and persistent identifier schemes,

• fostering research and best practice recommendations for formats and encoding 

schemes,

• fostering research and development of strategies, such as migration and emulation, that will ensure sustainability of digital content, and 

• developing a communication strategy to track technology changes and their 

impact on preservation.
7PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

Communication and Outreach

Outreach activities targeting professional and public audiences include:

• maintaining the NDIIPP Web site (www.digitalpreservation.gov), featuring current information on the program’s status,

• outreach to professional groups through participation in professional meetings 

and contributions to professional literature, and

• outreach to the public through print and Web-based general interest publications 

and through the broadcast media.

Digital Preservation Architecture

To address the next steps in building the digital preservation architecture, the Library 

will work with a variety of public and private institutions as well as the National Science Foundation to:

• convene a design group to further develop the components of the preservation 

architecture,

• solicit proposals to test and model components of the system, and

• evaluate project outcomes to inform a next generation of implementations.

Expected Outcomes

Through the execution of the NDIIPP initiative, the Library expects to have achieved:

• a clearer definition of the roles and responsibilities of partners in the preservation 

network,

• establishment of the relationships among key partners in the private and public 

sectors, including international institutions,

• clarification of intellectual property issues that impede preservation, together with 

recommendations to address them,

• creation of an advanced design for the digital architecture,

• identification of the next set of investments to advance NDIIPP goals,

• an advanced research agenda for preservation of digital content, and

• raised awareness among key stakeholders and the general public about the challenges and opportunities of digital preservation.

The Library’s plans for action over the next three to five years of NDIIPP will comprise investments and activities that will preserve digital content, build a resilient 

network of digital preservation partnerships, and begin development of the digital 

preservation architecture to support and enable these goals.

With the foresight and support of the U.S. Congress, together with a team of dedicated collaborators, the Library of Congress will lead a national initiative to preserve 

the nation’s cultural heritage—in all its forms—for generations to come.

9

Introduction

What Is at Stake 

The Library of Congress occupies a unique place in American civilization. Established as a legislative library in 1800, it grew into a national library in the 19th century as the unique depository of all copyrighted materials. Since World War II, it 

has become an international resource of unparalleled dimensions. It embodies the 

belief of the Founders that self-government depends vitally on free and open access 

to knowledge and the unhampered pursuit of truth by an informed and involved 

citizenry. 

Democracy works through a knowledge-based society, and the system of libraries 

that undergirds our national knowledge network has been generously and steadfastly 

supported by the U.S. Congress, both directly through the Library of Congress and 

through the budgetary and legislative actions that support the country’s library and 

information infrastructure. Together with the National Archives and Records Administration, the Library of Congress preserves a record of our national experience. In 

addition, the Library, through its special relationship with the Copyright Office, has 

built a record of the creativity and innovation of the nation. 

This record of information is jeopardized by the transformation that digital technology is forging. This new technology has spawned a surfeit of information that is 

extremely fragile, inherently impermanent, and difficult to assess for long-term value. 

America’s economic and political strength has relied for generations on the innovation and productivity of its people, and the “progress of science and useful arts” 

(stipulated in Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution) depends on the reliable 

preservation of knowledge and information for generations to come. 

Americans look to libraries to facilitate research in complete, authentic, original, 

undistorted sources. But we do not yet know how to preserve digital content, or even 

which content to preserve. Building a digital preservation infrastructure that will 
10PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

work alongside the one already in place for print and audiovisual materials poses 

great technical challenges. But to an even greater degree, it requires forging the legal, 

economic, and social agreements that will ensure that important digital data are 

deposited in their original form into a trusted repository for safe custody. 

The NDIIPP Legislation

In December 2000, Congress passed PL106-554 establishing the National Digital 

Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). It charges the Librarian of Congress to lead a nationwide planning effort for the long-term preservation of 

digital content. The conference report urges the Library to work jointly with key government agencies—the Department of Commerce, the White House Office of Science 

and Technology Policy, and the National Archives and Records Administration—and 

with those entities with expertise in the collection and maintenance of archives 

of digital materials—the National Library of Medicine, the National Agricultural 

Library, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Research Libraries 

Group, the OCLC Online Computer Library Center, and the Council on Library and 

Information Resources—as well as with the wide group of private sector institutions 

working in digital formats. 

For almost a decade, since the Internet became readily accessible through the World 

Wide Web, digital technology has been radically transforming the ways that we create 

and disseminate information. This continuing transformation of the information landscape is having profound effects on our society, our economy, our national security, 

and our lives as citizens of a democratic republic. It is also transforming the institutions that collect, preserve, and provide access to digital content in ways that cannot be overstated yet are still little understood. Now everyone can be his or her own 

publisher and digital formats are no sooner created than they are superseded by others. As a result, it is increasingly difficult for libraries to identify what is of value, to 

acquire it, and to ensure its longevity over time. Never has access to information that 

is authentic, reliable, and complete been more important, and never has the capacity 

of libraries to guarantee that access been in greater jeopardy.

By establishing the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation 

Program, the United States Congress recognized that the Library of Congress is 

uniquely positioned to bring together all the stakeholders in this new digital landscape—creators, distributors, and users—to address the problem of sorting and preserving significant content in the burgeoning world of digital information. With its 

core mission to make information available and useful, and to sustain and preserve a 

universal collection of knowledge and creativity regardless of format for current and 

future generations of Congress and the American people, the Library of Congress has 

a long history as a trusted convener able to facilitate the development of standards 

and best practices in librarianship and cultural stewardship across the country and 

internationally. 
11PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

In carrying out the NDIIPP mandate, the Library established a learning process in 

which each stage is informed and shaped by those that come before. The process 

began with a yearlong, nationwide, fact-finding effort and initial planning. Next, with 

Congressional approval, NDIIPP will invest in a set of activities proposed under 

the plan that include: practical applications and modeling of key components of the 

digital preservation infrastructure; developing core capacities for the preservation 

network; building a digital preservation architecture; and conducting targeted basic 

research needed for the management of digital content and of the systems that support it. These investments will both leverage the knowledge gained by a range of preservation stakeholders and broaden their participation in network building.

This document provides a plan for preserving digital information of national significance. It is the culmination of the initial planning phase. It represents the fruits of 

intensive consultations with a wide scope of American and international innovators, 

creators, and high-level managers of digital information in the private and public sectors. This document reports on the planning approach and on what has been learned 

from a variety of activities. (More details will be found in the accompanying appendices, and readers will be referred to these documents for additional information.) And 

it proposes a further set of actions and investments to begin practical applications 

and modeling approaches to implementation of NDIIPP. Even as NDIIPP moves 

forward, this plan will be continually scrutinized and refined, given the need to keep 

current with the rapid and unpredictable developments of technology, of the legal 

and rights regime governing digital content, of local and national economies, and of 

the grave uncertainties of our time. 

In the digital realm, the Library of Congress has developed model programs of sharing collections through digitization and has extended those programs through publicprivate partnerships to libraries in the United States and indeed abroad. (Among such 

programs are American Memory, Meeting of Frontiers, and the Global Legal Information Network [GLIN]). The Library must now move quickly to make similar progress 

with so-called born-digital materials and to develop a strategic vision for its role in 

this new information landscape. The Library recognizes that the critical next step in 

meeting the demands of stewardship in the digital age begins with casting its net wide 

to include other libraries, other federal agencies, and producers and distributors in 

the private sector.

13

Fact-Finding and Initial Planning

In order to respond to this NDIIPP mandate, the Library of Congress

embarked on planning through four major activities: 

• consultation with stakeholders, 

• background research, 

• scenario planning, and

• defining components of the digital preservation infrastructure. 

In addition to these activities, the Library has worked aggressively to begin to capture 

culturally and historically significant digital information before it can disappear, as 

also mandated by Congress. This includes Web-based information that falls within 

the Library’s collecting scope of documenting the history and creativity of the American people. These collecting activities include documenting the elections of 2000, the 

events of September 11, the 2002 Winter Olympics, as well as the upcoming elections 

of 2002 and the complete archives of eight of the journals of the American Physical 

Society. Other pilot projects have explored the selection, capture, and preservation 

Figure 1. Planning approach

Consultation with stakeholders

Background research

Scenario planning

Defining the digital

preservation infrastructure

Planning outcomes
14PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

challenges of Web-based moving-image materials, sites that exemplify the extraordinary range of creativity—both of new content and of new modes of distribution—that 

the Web has spawned. 

The goal of this plan for digital preservation is to encourage shared responsibility for 

digital content and to seek national solutions for:

• the continued collection, selection, and organization of the most historically significant cultural materials and the most important information resources, regardless of evolving formats,

• the long-term storage, preservation, and authenticity of those materials, and

• persistent, rights-protected access for the public to the digital heritage of the 

American people.

The national solutions we seek must be arrived at by a collaboration among key 

stakeholders and in an atmosphere of trust and of willingness to learn from experience and share knowledge. The Library is uniquely positioned to play the role of convener and honest broker in forging these new relationships and operating agreements. 

We designed a planning process to achieve the following outcomes:

• defining the problem of digital preservation and its scope,

• identifying and engaging preservation stakeholders, broadly defined,

• beginning the conversation among concerned parties,

• identifying a network of libraries and private-sector partners for action,

• defining their respective roles and that of the Library of Congress,

• developing a preservation research and development agenda,

• creating a framework for developing sustainable models of preservation, and 

• raising awareness of digital preservation. 

These goals called for the following planning steps, all accomplished in the past 18 

months:

• establishing a 27-member National Digital Strategy Advisory Board,

• coordinating with other federal agencies,

• convening sessions of stakeholders to listen and learn, 

• commissioning reviews of emerging digital content, 

• commissioning a background study on copyright’s role in preservation,

• surveying national and international initiatives in this area,

• defining the types of roles, responsibilities, functions, and services for digital 

preservation, 

• developing a series of possible future scenarios and contingencies, and

• developing a digital preservation architecture that establishes critical consensus 

on technical approaches.
15PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

As the planning process unfolded over the course of the year, much was learned from 

those the Library engaged in dialogue, and modifications were made in the process 

as needed. Unexpected outcomes early in the planning process enabled the Library 

to move more quickly than anticipated. For example, a resounding consensus was 

achieved rapidly on the part of all stakeholders that preservation is a serious problem 

that demands swift action. Even those who are chiefly concerned about access—such 

as publishers and the entertainment media—see the lack of preservation as a major 

threat to their core missions. There was also consensus that the most important role 

the Library can play in this stage of development is as a convener and facilitator of 

collaborative solutions.

Consultation with Stakeholders

Consultation with stakeholder communities began in the spring of 2001 with the 

formation of a high-level advisory board and was followed by several stakeholder 

meetings that also included international participation. This was accompanied by 

continuing interviews and consultation with a wide group of other experts during the 

year (see Appendix 1 for a list of participants). 

National Digital Strategy Advisory Board

Early in the consultative period, the Librarian of Congress established the National 

Digital Strategy Advisory Board (NDSAB), comprising representatives from other 

federal agencies, industry, research libraries, and foundations (see Appendix 1 for 

membership). The Advisory Board is charged, among other things, to provide advice 

on national strategies for the long-term preservation of digital materials; advice on 

identifying and prioritizing national issues such as intellectual property and rights 

management, requirements for archiving and repositories, planning for life-cycle 

management of digital content, and promoting collaboration among stakeholders; 

and advice on practical applications and modeling of preservation strategies. The 

NDSAB has convened three times in the past year.

Stakeholder Meetings

Stakeholder meetings were a key part of the Library’s systematic approach to consultation and were designed to:

• identify barriers to and opportunities for building a distributed preservation infrastructure,

• engage the actors and explore the new roles and responsibilities they might be 

willing and able to fulfill,

• seek advice on issues that included technology, rights to archive, and permission 

to access digital content, and 

• explore models of sustainability for the costly enterprise of archiving. 
16PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

In November 2001, the Library convened in Washington, D.C. approximately 70 

people representing: professional associations; entertainment, film, music, radio, 

commercial and noncommercial broadcasting; higher education; libraries, museums, 

nonprofit organizations, foundations and cultural institutions; newspaper, magazine, 

book and textbook publishing; scholarly journals; and software, Web design, and 

development. The Library brought together vice presidents for technology and chief 

technology officers; senior librarians and archivists; senior executives and editors in 

commercial and noncommercial broadcasting, and in scholarly and commercial publishing and journalism; university professors and academic administrators; program 

directors; a present and a past CEO of major pioneering corporations; and others in 

leadership and decision-making positions. Many of these individuals have diverse 

career portfolios and were able to speak to several issues across multiple industries.

Other federal agencies and library organizations also participated in the meetings, 

including representatives from the Department of Commerce, the National Archives 

and Records Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the 

National Library of Medicine, the National Agricultural Library, the OCLC Online 

Computer Library Center, the Research Libraries Group, and the Council on Library 

and Information Resources. 

These sessions brought together communities that seldom, if ever, meet, in large 

part because they lack a neutral forum in which to discuss common concerns. The 

meetings established some baseline areas of consensus: on the need for the national 

preservation initiative, NDIIPP; on the need for a distributed or decentralized solution; on the need for more research into the technologies for digital preservation; and 

a recognition that technology is an important part of the solution but not the most 

important.

The sessions also surfaced priorities for action or research on: intellectual property 

and liability issues; the scope of collecting, that is, what is preserved by whom, for 

whom, and in what forms; understanding better who the users are and will be; and 

balancing the interests of preservation and access. There were additional concerns 

about developing sustainable economic models for the expensive enterprise of 

preservation. 

All agreed that the problem is urgent; that action is needed now, not some time in the 

future; and that everyone—from creators to custodians—must contribute to the solution and learn to operate fluently in a world of constant and unpredictable change. 

In addition to these sessions, the Library continually sought out interviews and meetings, often on a confidential basis, with leaders in industry, technology, librarianship 

and archiving, and scholarship. The interviewees were asked to identify their enterprises’ needs for preservation; to identify what roles their organizations could (and 

could not) play in a distributed preservation infrastructure; what role they would 

like to see the Library of Congress play; and what specific actions can and should 

be taken in the near term. These conversations, along with the public sessions, have 

deeply informed the planning process, and the fruits of those conversations will be 

found throughout the following section on the current state of digital preservation.
17PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

Background Research

Surveying the Landscape 

Surveys, studies, and other information gathering continued throughout the year. 

As background for the stakeholder meetings in the fall, the Library worked with the 

Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), a not-for-profit organization 

devoted to issues facing libraries and archives, to commission a series of six reviews 

of media types, conducted by experts of national repute. This work focused on 

areas of digital collection development that present new challenges to preservation: 

e-journals; e-books; digital sound recordings; digital video; digital television; and Web 

archiving (see Appendix 2).

In addition, the Library commissioned through CLIR surveys and assessments of 

the current digital preservation activities of the Association of Research Libraries, 

the Digital Library Federation, and major national libraries abroad (see Appendices 

3, 4, and 5), and inventoried digital initiatives in the United States. In response to 

concerns raised at the November stakeholder meetings, a leading expert in copyright 

was called upon to write a report detailing the relationship between preservation 

and copyright, and to clarify specifically the effect that copyright legislation has on a 

library’s right to preserve materials and in what format (see Appendix 6).

The Library consulted systematically with other federal agencies and libraries that 

have expertise in managing digital information. 

Defining Components of the Digital Preservation Infrastructure 

A concurrent effort defined the scope of the digital preservation infrastructure, building on the knowledge yielded through stakeholder meetings, independent research, 

and further consultation (see Box 1, page 18). The purpose of defining this context is to: identify the scope of activities that transpire in this landscape; identify all 

the potential actors and institutions—from writers and filmmakers to libraries and 

archives; and to define future (existing and new) coordinating bodies, research and 

development activities, and enabling agreements that will ensure the preservation of 

and access to digital content over time. This broad context also accounts for the functions and services required for the preservation and use of digital assets and related 

information. Together, these actors, coordinating bodies, enabling agreements about 

roles and responsibilities, research, policies, and practices all constitute the digital 

preservation network. Finally, the infrastructure includes the technology components 

and technical standards necessary to build the digital preservation infrastructure.

What most distinguishes the digital preservation context from the analog one now 

in place for libraries, archives, museums, and other heritage institutions, is the sheer 

scale of it. It comprehends vastly larger amounts of information, created in a greater 

variety of formats, and distributed in new venues to a larger and more heterogeneous 

user base. The digital preservation infrastructure will be characterized by a complex 

network of relationships and dependencies that are simply unknown in the world of 

print and analog sound and image resources.
18PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

Leveraging Federal Research Investments

In order to mobilize funding for work on the critical issues of digital preservation, the 

Library co-sponsored with the National Science Foundation’s Digital Government 

and Digital Libraries Initiative programs an effort to define significant and feasible 

research challenges that will engage researchers from academia, industry, and government. Through initial consultations with numerous professional consortia and 15 federal agencies, a preliminary agenda of investigation was agreed upon, focusing on: 

• core technical infrastructure,

• preservation technologies and tools,

• access to and use of preserved digital content, and

• basic computer science issues for large-scale storage systems.

In partnership with the Library of Congress, the National Science Foundation (NSF) 

convened a workshop in April 2002 that brought together 51 specialists from government agencies, academia, and industry with expertise in computer science, mass 

storage systems, archival science, digital libraries, and information management to 

develop a research agenda. NSF and the Library of Congress are planning to put out 

a call for proposals in fiscal year 2003. While research results from this investment 

will typically not be completed for three to five years, or even longer, there are also a 

number of areas of more narrowly defined applied research—into cost models of various acquisition technologies, of life-cycle management, and so forth—that are likely 

to find funding during this period from foundations, other libraries, and the Library 

of Congress (see Appendix 7).

Box 1. Key NDIIPP Terms

The digital preservation infrastructure comprises two key components: the digital 

preservation network of partners collaborating to preserve and provide long-term 

access to digital content; and the digital preservation architecture, the technical 

components that enable digital preservation. The digital preservation infrastructure is 

designed to support the needs of multiple communities over long periods of time; to 

respond to rapidly changing technologies and innovative behaviors; and to be transparent and trustworthy.

The digital preservation network is the actors—creators and producers, owners, collectors, distributors, preservers, users, and others—who collaborate to preserve digital 

content. The network also comprises the coordinating bodies, enabling agreements 

about roles and responsibilities, research, policies, and practices that make collaboration possible.

The digital preservation architecture is the technical framework that specifies the 

structures, logical components, and logical interrelationships of a system that enables 

digital preservation through a network of partners.
19PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

Scenario Planning

As demonstrated by preliminary research and consultation, there is no clear solution 

or set of solutions to meet the challenges of digital preservation. The unpredictability 

of technological development (who could have predicted the explosive appearance 

of the World Wide Web in 1985, 10 years before it appeared?); the business climate 

(who could have predicted the Internet boom and bust of the late 1990s?); and, of 

course, the global political environment that changed forever on September 11, 2001 

—all contribute to the challenge of plotting a course in the face of a wide range of 

possible futures.

To that end, the Library undertook a process familiar to corporations, that of scenario planning. It engaged Global Business Network (GBN) to conduct the planning, 

and it in turn enlisted a number of experts from libraries, media, content creation, 

and technology companies to identify collectively the key driving forces and variables 

in the foreseeable future—in this case, 2017—in order to prepare possible futures for 

the Library and for digital preservation actors broadly defined. The resulting views 

into possible futures informed later thinking about how to develop the network of 

partners and technology components to enable digital preservation (see Appendix 8). 

Digital Preservation Architecture

The Library developed a high-level model of a technology infrastructure that would 

allow all the actors in the digital preservation network—from a manager of a digital 

repository to a television production company seeking to comply with the mandatory 

deposit requirements of the copyright law—to envisage how a distributed preservation infrastructure might work to benefit their stated interests in preservation. This 

has been defined as the digital preservation architecture (see Box 1, page 18, and 

Appendix 9). 

Planning Outcomes

The Library has clearly learned, through extensive consultation and convening of 

diverse communities, that many new actors in the digital information landscape share 

Congress’s concerns about the fate of digital content. They expressed readiness to 

partner with the Library to find appropriate ways to be stewards of our collective 

digital present and future. The Library identified shared understandings about digital 

preservation on the following:

• the problem is widespread among stakeholders,

• the problem is urgent,

• research is needed into new technologies for archiving,

• the problem cannot be solved exclusively through technology,

• the solutions are many,
20PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

• the solutions must be collaborative,

• the solutions will change and evolve with time,

• standards for information description and sharing are needed, and 

• the Library of Congress can play a unique role as trusted third party to convene 

and facilitate.

The Library also identified a significant number of external factors that bear greatly 

on any outcome:

• the rapid and unpredictable growth of technology,

• the changing economic and political climate, and 

• the legal and rights management regimes that control digital content.

All stakeholders recognize the danger in letting preservation issues be driven by those 

of access. Many came to the stakeholder sessions with the fear that issues of copyright and asset management would cut off conversations that need to focus on preservation. Stakeholders—from creators and distributors to scholars and librarians—all 

started from the same point: fear of losses. Business fears loss of current and future 

revenue; scientists fear loss of data crucial for the progress of science and engineering; scholars and librarians fear loss of the cultural and historical record. 

Digital information technology is not evolutionary, but revolutionary: It transforms 

how we create, acquire, disseminate, and preserve information. The scope of the 

problem it creates is incommensurate with present experience and resources. The 

Library therefore advocates an approach to the problem that builds on the collective 

experiences, expertise, and will of digital creators and libraries. The approach is: 

• catalytic: invests in existing strengths, leverages public and private investments, 

and stimulates research and development where needed,

• collaborative: engages willing partners and key stakeholders in areas of mutual 

interest and expertise,

• iterative: learns from the initial planning and fact-finding to inform subsequent 

actions and investments, and 

• strategic: addresses a broad spectrum of issues in technology, collection development, infrastructure and organization, standards, and other key components of 

the digital preservation infrastructure.

Stakeholders in preservation must remain poised to adapt quickly to externalities that 

may prove critical but over which they have little control: economical, technological, 

legal, regulatory, and those relating to national security.
21

It is often said, citing Moore’s Law that the number of transistors 

(hence, computing power) held on a chip doubles every 18 months, that the costs of 

storage are going down, and therefore “preservation will not be a problem.” But preservation is not merely storage. The goal of preservation is to maintain an information 

asset so that is it is readily accessible for use, no matter what format it was originally 

in, and ensuring that it is authentic and reliable by preventing such things as tampering, accidental corruption of files, media degradation, and losses through software 

and hardware obsolescence. This mandates active, not passive, management of content and thus involves a large number of actors to work collaboratively toward the 

common goal of preserving digital heritage. 

The State of Digital Preservation

Figure 2. Moore’s Law: Computer Processing Power Doubles Every 18 Months

45

40

35

30

25

20

15

10

5

0

Source: Taken from information presented in “Moore’s Law—Overview,” Intel Corporation, http://www.intel.com/research/

silicon/mooreslaw.htm; downloaded September 10, 2002.

Computational Power

(millions of transistors per integrated circuit)

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000
22PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

Challenges of Collecting and Preserving Digital Content

Current Environment

One of the chief tasks of NDIIPP is to identify and provide for all the barriers to progress in digital preservation. The most salient are those caused by the rapid changes in 

technology. Frustrations are shared by industry and collecting institutions alike over 

the multiplicity of formats, rapid technological changes, and hardware and software 

obsolescence that plague the new information technologies. Even storage media that 

promise stability, such as CDs, are subject to unpredictable degradation and have not 

demonstrated that they are of archival quality. Producers of content and preservationists also report serious problems arising from the formal and informal standardssetting processes that result in both too many and too few technical standards, and, 

for film, television and sound, as well as early computer files, problems associated 

with playback. 

Representatives of the film, television, and music industries also agreed that there are 

substantial technical differences among the formats, despite commonalities. There 

is some disagreement among experts about whether to focus on the issues that arise 

within format types (musical versus image-based versus text, for example) and in 

which consensus might be reached among fewer stakeholders, or whether it is better 

to address problems faced by all, where more resources might be mustered but agreements among disparate communities might be hard to cement.

But these technological problems are not the only ones people are concerned about. 

No one consulted in this planning process asserted that the problems are solely or 

even chiefly technical. Indeed, some even suggested that technology will address 

some problems sooner rather than later and that other major problems—legal, social, 

and economic—will remain. Moreover, it is clear that the new technologies are resulting in shifts in institutional roles and functions that are not well understood. However, before exploring some of the more important implications of those changing 

roles, it is important to clarify what content is being created with new technologies 

and what problems arise from the nature of these digital objects.

Transforming Content

Investigations into six new media types, commissioned for NDIIPP (see Appendix 

2), provide a baseline for understanding emerging issues that will mark the digital 

landscape into the future. The formats explored—e-books, e-journals, digital music, 

digital television, digital video, and Web sites—are complex and present enormous 

technical challenges in their creation, distribution, and preservation. These difficulties have profound implications for the right to preserve as well as access. These new 

formats redefine genres: even such things as books and journals that seem so stable 

in the print regime are redefined online. The distribution models used with particular 

formats, above all, the Web, blur the line between published and unpublished. They 

facilitate new user behaviors, create new user expectations, and in fact draw new 

users to old content. They demand new approaches to selecting and cataloging. They 
23PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

use new means of distribution to reach new audiences. Some genres break traditional ties between ownership and preservation, such as e-journals that license their 

content when their print counterparts were bought and sold as physical artifacts in 

which a library had certain rights. Nearly all require careful thought be given to what 

constitutes the so-called best edition of a given work, the copy of a copyrighted work 

published in the United States that is deposited with the Copyright Office to comply 

with the mandatory deposit requirement of the copyright law. Above all, these formats show how different each new genre can be and that no one solution for preservation works for all, any more than book conservation techniques work for restoring 

nitrate film. 

The summaries below, based on the environmental scans, illustrate the range of format and genre complexities that must be addressed in NDIIPP. They are followed by 

a short consideration of even more complex digital media types, such as Geographic 

Information Systems (GIS), that will take libraries, archives, and museums well 

beyond the formats that they have expertise in preserving. Taken together, these digital content types also begin to define who are the actors in preservation and access, 

what are their roles and responsibilities, and what agreements among them must be 

renewed or redefined to ensure future access to our digital heritage. 

E-BOOKS AND E-JOURNALS When books “go digital,” the conversion of texts into digital formats may seem fairly straightforward from a technical point of view. But in fact 

it reveals just how complex an object a book really is—a form that took centuries of 

development after the invention of printing to evolve into something familiar to us 

today, with standards for spelling and grammar, typeface, production and distribution, and preservation.

Because e-books are read on handheld devices that do not approximate the size of 

a book, the correlation between a printed page and an e-book screen varies—and it 

varies in turn from device to device—so even elementary orienting devices, such as 

pages and page numbers, need to be reconceived for the e-book. Industry is devising new standards for online books that allow for some conformity among different 

proprietary software approaches. But, given the commercial nature of the enterprise, 

so far the problem is not a lack of standards, but a proliferation of competing ones 

(at least 26 e-book standards initiatives are cited by Frank Romano, the expert who 

wrote the environmental scan on e-books). Perhaps out of fear induced by peer-topeer music file sharing programs, publishers and distributors of e-books are turning to 

elaborate security precautions in a market that is, as yet, underdeveloped. 

But peer-to-peer sharing of text has been the norm in print, protected by the doctrine 

of first sale, and has supported the public access provided by libraries and undergirds 

the market in used books. And it has other important commercial benefits: advertising rates for journals, for example, are calibrated to the estimate of how many times 

one copy will be shared and thus how many eyes can be captured with one copy. The 

future market for e-books remains a subject of some debate in the publishing world. 

At present it looks as if the needs of the commercial sector to protect and promote 
24PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

its digital books through proprietary software and hardware devices throws up additional barriers to cost-effective and scalable preservation approaches. Much work 

has been done by publishers and libraries with e-book content, and much remains to 

be done. NDIIPP will leverage the experience and expertise that exists in this field to 

resolve some of the issues that have been raised above.

Journals—serial publications that aggregate articles by different authors—present 

even greater problems than books when they move online. Journals usually comprise 

a great variety of information, from articles and short features, to editorial board listings, graphics and photographs, and advertising. Online they are frequently in different formats and often provided solely through links to other providers. With articles 

replete with citations to secondary online resources that may themselves be under 

rights protection, or may link to a source (such as a database) that is not preserved or 

itself changes, what is a library to preserve? What are implications for science and the 

need to test and replicate results if data referred to in one article are linked to a site 

that is later unavailable? To preserve an article, must one preserve all the links? Does 

one have a right to? What should a publisher do about correcting errata online? 

Does the corrected version supersede the first one? Are they both necessary for the 

historical record? And the issues of online advertisements is most perplexing: usually 

ads are targeted for specific audiences, often created “on the fly” (dynamically), and 

frequently updated. 

In print newspapers and magazines, advertisements have come to be seen by 

researchers as rich original resources that provide social, economic, artistic, and 

other context for the contemporary content they accompany. They are highly valued 

by historians, theater and film set designers, genealogists, and any number of users. 

How should libraries preserve the technically complex advertising that supports so 

many digital periodicals? Similarly complex are the growing variety of supplemental 

materials that can be conveyed online that tend to exploit the possibilities of the technology more than the texts do: spreadsheets, visualizations, computer simulations, 

executable files that project weather patterns, to name but a few. These all constitute 

primary evidence of the innovation spawned by the digital revolution and, as such, 

should be prime collecting targets for contemporary libraries. There are a number 

of fruitful collaborations between libraries and e-journal publishers under way that 

can be leveraged by NDIIPP to address such issues as how to handle links to outside 

documents, what content should be preserved as part of a best edition, and which 

business models would support both sustainability and long-term preservation.

DIGITAL SOUND RECORDINGS The issues surrounding the preservation of digital 

recordings of music are exponentially more complex than those for print materials, 

for example, books or sheet music. As with digital text, the problems are technical, 

legal, and economic in scope, but because the technology and media used in sound 

recording are more complicated and fragile than print on paper, and the rights regime 

surrounding uses such as performances and reproductions more layered than for 

print publications, the way forward for preservation is even less clear. There was no 

copyright protection for the sounds and the contributions of recording artists until 
25PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

1972. So with respect to pre-1972 U.S. sound recordings, it is difficult to determine 

who owns rights in the recording itself (as opposed to the music) because there is no 

central registry of such information before this date. This has direct impact on preservation in the digital realm, because the future preservation technique for analog 

recordings (including all those created before 1972) will be largely digital. 

The importance of preserving the music and recorded sound created since the invention of recording techniques just over 100 years ago was recently confirmed by 

Congress in the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000. The legacy of recorded 

sound in peril includes the voices of native Americans speaking in tongues now nearing extinction; the songs of birds and whales; the oral traditions of folk artists; and, of 

course, music both commercial and noncommercial, classical and popular. Because 

of the fragility of analog tape, wax cylinders, acetate discs, and other media on which 

sounds have been recorded, reformatting is necessary to secure access to all forms of 

analog recordings into the future.

Indeed, as Samuel Brylawski notes in his paper on sound recordings, “ultimately, 

preservation reformatting will be required for all media upon which sound has been 

recorded, since preservationists acknowledge that there is no permanent format,” 

either analog or digital (see Appendix 2, page 76). For a variety of technical and 

economic reasons, there is an overwhelming consensus that all preservation reformatting should and will be digital. Solving the digital preservation problem will be the 

only way to secure our aural heritage, both analog and digital, and there is little time 

to lose.

Under the National Recording Preservation Act, Congress has charged the Library of 

Congress with the hard work of developing standards for reformatting and preserving 

recorded sound, and because the future of audio preservation, even of the heritage 

of analog recordings, is digital, there will be a concerted effort in the near term to 

develop a system that will ensure the continued access to at least a portion of the 

aural wealth that abounds in libraries, archives, and recording studio vaults, in collectors’ basements and attics.

As summed up by Brylawski, “The future of audio preservation is reformatting audio 

tapes and discs to computer files and systematically managing those files in a repository.” Such audiovisual archives, also known as digital mass-storage systems, exist 

in Europe. “The well-planned repository presumes media obsolescence, plans for it, 

and, according to its supporters, frees the archive community of the futile search for 

an affordable permanent medium.” But, he continues, “whether for lack of foresight 

or funding, libraries are not creating mass-storage systems for audiovisual works.... 

We face an extraordinary dilemma: at a time when a greater range of audio is available to more people than ever before, and the means are finally at hand to preserve 

those sounds for posterity, we stand the greatest risk of losing them” (see Appendix 2, 

page 80).

DIGITAL TELEVISION AND VIDEO No longer are there questions about the primacy of 

broadcast television as a record of contemporary history and culture. Local, national, 
26PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

and global in scope and reach, television and video have transformed the ways that 

society views and understands itself. One need only recollect the role television 

played in the Gulf War or, more recently, the unfolding of the September 11 tragedy, to understand that contemporary history cannot be told without a full record of 

television. 

As with digitally recorded music, many of the salient difficulties of acquiring and 

preserving digital television and video are related to machine and media dependencies that affect analog as well as digital broadcasts. Technical experts such as Mary 

Ide, Dave MacCarn, Thom Shepard, and Leah Weisse on television, and Howard 

D. Wactlar and Michael G. Christel on video, see the move to digital as offering 

many solutions to problems inherent in both analog and digital television and video 

formats. Again, as in music, moving image archivists are familiar with a rapid and 

expensive pattern of technical innovation and obsolescence, with the constant need 

to refresh and reformat from one medium and machine dependency to another, with 

the need for massive storage systems, and with the dizzying succession of formats that 

demand new standards and are quickly superseded by others. 

Digital television and video nearly always comprise a complex mix of elements—text, 

image, and audio, each with their own technical and metadata requirements for preservation—that demand very large scale storage systems. What one thinks of as shows 

are made of audio and visual elements that are stored and managed separately. In 

addition, a good deal of additional information needs to be preserved with the files, 

and there are digital rights management systems that need to be integrated into the 

large digital asset management infrastructure in an archives. 

Digital moving image does promise to solve one serious problem in the television 

and film preservation communities, and that is of having to deal with the increasingly 

fragile medium of tape. “The notion of an ‘artifact-free’ method of distribution,” write 

Wactlar and Christel, “will have a great impact on preservation. Instead of moving 

digital information to tapes for distribution, data will simply consist of a file transfer 

to some temporary storage device, which might periodically be wiped clean.” However, they note, “failure to assign clear responsibility for preserving these broadcast 

materials may result in tremendous losses” (Appendix 2, page 93). Once again, the 

key to preserving the rich record of digital creativity and history will depend on a 

strong network of institutions willing to claim responsibility for preservation and the 

maintenance of a transparent system of tracking and accountability.

WEB SITES The Web is best understood as a medium of information exchange that 

uses the delivery mechanism of the Internet. The Web functions as the most accessible bulletin board imaginable: Anyone can create a publicly available Web page, no 

prior authorization needed. It is much easier to “publish to the Web” than through 

traditional means, and the Web has consequently been populated by millions of creators who would not normally have access to other publishing outlets. As of January 

2002, the Web comprised more than 550 billion public pages and linked documents. 

While it is not even a decade old, the Web is enormous and grows by 7 million pages 
27PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

a day. At the same time, the mortality rate of Web sites is equally impressive: 44 percent of the sites available in 1998 were gone by 1999 (see Appendix 2, page 53). 

“Saving the Web,” then, is no more feasible nor desirable than saving the contents of 

everything that has ever been put to paper, to film, and to recorded sound disc across 

the globe. Nonetheless, it is very important for libraries to collect and preserve the 

content on the Web that is appropriate for the institution and for cultural memory, 

and this presents challenges on a scale as large as the Web itself. There are formidable 

technical challenges, common to all digital documents, of course. But beyond those, 

the problems start with capture of the Web. While Web harvesting, an approach used 

to create a “snapshot record” of the Web, can capture static HTML pages (the socalled surface Web), the deep Web, where much of the complex and culturally rich 

materials reside, is normally inaccessible to harvesting technologies. Even the surface 

Web is closed to harvesters in many cases because the materials require a license 

or other authorization to enter. And the average Web page contains 15 links. How 

does one define the boundaries of a Web site? This is among many questions that are 

emerging from early experiments in capturing content from the Web, and NDIIPP 

will engage these issues in its next phase.

Libraries have centuries of experience in selecting content that has long-term cultural 

value among an abundance of compelling material on paper. In this sense, the Web 

is familiar to librarians as a medium that contains text, numbers, and images, and 

that indifferently carries content as diverse as Shakespeare and screenplays, Ansel 

Adams photographs and family snapshots, manuscript maps of the Lewis and Clark 

expedition and AAA Trip Tiks for a road trip from St. Louis to Portland, nervous 

doodles and laundry lists, tax returns and top secret memoranda. Libraries have built 

collections of great merit, all the while having to make difficult choices of selection 

Figure 3. The Creation of Born-Digital Content Estimated to Nearly Double 

 Every Year

14,000

12,000

10,000

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

0

Source: Lyman, Peter, and Hal R. Varian, “How Much Information,” 2000. www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info/

magnetic.html

Original Data Stored on Hard Disk

(petabytes)

1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
28PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

among such materials on paper. The challenge of selecting from the Web may turn 

out to have similar conceptual complexities, but the scope of materials is vaster. Most 

experts agree that identifying and capturing content of enduring value on the Web is 

the most formidable challenge of preserving it. It may be advisable to start with “published” content, such as online journals and other items that have known value in the 

analog realm for acquisition and preservation, and negotiate the deposit of the content (see above on e-books and e-journals). 

Another area of promise is to capture government information that is on the Web 

where the online versions have superseded print versions. It is also important for 

American libraries to capture foreign sites (both official and unofficial or dissident 

sites) in Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and other places where 

national libraries may not be positioned to do so at present. Libraries will need to 

revisit their collecting policies and develop shared agreements to reduce undesirable 

redundancies of Web capture.

The Library of Congress has been collaborating with the several entities that capture 

and preserve endangered and short-term sites, and this Web-based capture should be 

continued and extended broadly to other libraries; at the same time the legal issues 

surrounding copyright need to be clarified. While we can safely say that content on 

the Web is protected by copyright, can we determine whether or not a document on 

the Web is published or unpublished? The answer will have significant impact on a 

library’s ability to capture, preserve, and provide access to that site.

OTHER MEDIA These six formats are by no means the only ones that are new in 

the information landscape. There are others yet emerging that exploit more fully 

the interactive and customizable features of the technology. Chief among them 

are those that produce documents “on the fly” as a result of a query to a database. 

A prime example is the Geographic Information System (GIS), which “maps” a 

response to a query by matching data to spatial coordinates. It is not far-fetched 

to assume that within a decade or two, GIS will supersede the mass production of 

maps on paper. Pocket maps may be replaced by handheld GPS (Global Positioning Systems) and census maps replaced by massive datasets with a number of query 

interfaces that produce maps on the fly to answer questions about any number of 

demographic queries.

In this case, digital cartography is really best understood as an access tool, rather 

than something that produces a document, such as a map, or a specific set of data. 

What happens then to the map collections in research libraries? How will the Library 

of Congress and other collecting institutions “collect and preserve” maps? Will they 

instead acquire and preserve massive datasets and the software that people use to 

query the data? What kind of technical infrastructure, collection development and 

access policies, and user services must be in place to ensure future access to such geospatial materials?

Similarly, there are other formats that currently fill the stacks and storage shelves of 

libraries that are disappearing. The way that the telegraph came and went, so too are 
29PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

manuscripts going as people adopt word processing technologies. Correspondence is 

being replaced by e-mail. Libraries will need to partner with important actors and agencies to ensure that they are keeping correspondence documents in forms that can be 

accessioned. We do not know the full implications for libraries of these radical transformations in formats and presentation modes for digital information. All we can do is 

acquire some of these new formats and track closely what their custodial needs are and 

how users interact with them. A big focus of NDIIPP into the future will be not just a 

technology watch, but also a format and genre watch and a careful watch of users.

To develop rich and culturally significant digital collections in this environment, 

librarians and others must examine the implications of these changes to information 

and what they mean for such things as:

• Definitions of genres: What is a digital object and what are its boundaries?

• Dynamism of data: How does one select and curate digital objects built of 

dynamic data?

• Assessment of value: How does one identify enduring value?

• Intellectual property rights: How does one comply with the terms and conditions 

of use and payment when necessary?

• Mode of acquisition: What are the advantages and disadvantages of Web harvesting versus deposit of source file?

• Best editions: What should be deposited for copyright and in which format(s)?

• User studies: Who is using digital content and how? In what formats do they 

prefer it?

Transforming Roles

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? No longer can preservation be seen as a “just in case” activity 

that takes place after distribution, in anticipation of some future use at an unknown 

time, as it has been with libraries and archives for centuries. Rather, it calls for active 

management of files from the beginning, and therefore a decision about preservation 

almost at the time of creation—a huge shift in the relationship between preservation 

and access that is little recognized and less understood. 

Key technical factors affect the longevity of digital objects. A digital object must be 

created in sufficiently standard formats (that is, not idiosyncratic or proprietary) that 

it can move from one hardware/software configuration to another over the course 

of its life cycle. The digital object must be accompanied by metadata—the digital 

cataloging that describes the object, gives provenance information, specifies its file 

formats, and so forth. These requirements place a new burden on the creator and the 

publisher, distributor, or aggregator, who do not presently have to think about preservation when they shoot a film or send a manuscript to the printer.

As one participant said, much of what is most innovative and worthy of preservation 

is created by men and women without the resources to store and manage their output 
30PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

over time. They are too busy creating to become their own archivists. What incentives can we provide to musicians, writers, scientists, videographers, choreographers, 

architects, photographers, and others to assume the burden of preservation?

There are some new models of preservation that are emerging, however (see Appendix 4). There are academic disciplines that are managing their own pre-print papers 

(for example, the arXiv [www.arxiv.org] that serves the physics and mathematics 

communities) or their own datasets (Inter-university Consortium for Social and Political Research [ICPSR, www.icpsr.umich.edu] and PubMed Central [www.pubmed

central.nih.gov]), and for-profit and nonprofit academic publishers (Elsevier Science, the American Physical Society) that are partnering with libraries in pilots to 

preserve electronic content. Film and television firms are developing in-house digital 

asset management systems designed to preserve content for reuse (“repurposing”) for 

at least some limited periods of time that in many ways model longer-term preservation interventions. There are archiving services such as JSTOR for scholarly journals 

(www.jstor.org) and library service providers such as the Online Computer Library 

Center (www.oclc.org) and the Research Libraries Group (www.rlg.org) that are 

undertaking digital preservation services for their members. There are even individuals who represent a new breed of collector in the digital realm who are capturing 

readily accessible parts of the Web. The Library has identified a number of these new 

participants as potential partners going forward. Clearly, more are needed.

WHO PAYS? Preservation is expensive, and heretofore few institutions and businesses other than libraries and archives have undertaken it on behalf of present and 

future generations. We have not had to pay upfront costs for preservation before. We 

have always benefited from the actions taken by previous generations. But things 

have changed. Distribution of costs among the stakeholders, from creators and 

archivers to the users who benefit from both of their activities, will be a crucial sticking point in the development of any sustainable preservation infrastructure. As noted 

by Dale Flecker (see Appendix 2, page 31), some of the costs that must be considered 

include:

• notification or identification of content to be collected and preserved,

• creation of an archival version of the content if the access version is not sufficiently robust,

• creation of preservation metadata,

• storage, monitoring, and management of data in the repository,

• preservation actions taken on the content, and 

• services to users and owners/rights holders.

The costs of many of these actions are unknown, and a major area of research in 

the near term must be cost modeling and the development and testing of business 

models. Many industry representatives consulted by the Library declared themselves 

“eager to align business and cultural needs” through cooperation on preservation. 

The key for them is to ensure protection of their current and future revenue streams. 
31PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

Conversations at the stakeholder meetings and elsewhere explored issues related to 

valuing donated content and the use of possible tax incentives, a strategy that has 

been employed for cultural preservation projects in the analog realm. What is an 

appropriate method for appraising the value of digital assets that an owner may wish 

to donate to a library or museum, as donors do now with rare books, maps, photographs, artworks, manuscripts, and other cultural treasures? How do we develop the 

financial infrastructure that would encourage digital philanthropy?

There remains substantial ambiguity surrounding key economic issues. Since the 

development of tape- and disc-based digital storage systems in the 1960s, more than 

200 storage formats alone have been deployed, with none lasting more than 10 years, 

necessitating massive migration of data from system to system (see Appendix 2, page 

40). This puts content not aggressively managed every year at risk of sudden death. 

Moore’s Law notwithstanding, a representative of a major research university library 

lamented, the cost of storage remains a line item in the annual budget. And costs are 

not going down. 

The digital realm is one of change and uncertainty, and it is likely to remain so for 

the foreseeable future. Even the most astute businesspeople cannot forecast anything 

comfortably because change is so rapid that it is too difficult to develop viable business models. Moreover, as one adviser remarked, not only is the content ephemeral, 

so are the relationships between the information and the creators. How does one 

secure revenue? Attempts to “lock down assets” through encryption and other hightech means may end up removing the asset from the marketplace, choking off revenue, and, ultimately, making the technical challenges of preservation overwhelming. 

It will be important to strike a balance between too much security and too little. 

The Library was advised over and over, in this atmosphere of uncertainty and lack 

of tested business models and enduring relationships, that participants in digital creation and preservation need trusted third parties who will address issues of longevity 

when others have abandoned digital material. There should be fail-safe mechanisms 

to rescue digital content of high cultural and historical value that is in peril. The 

Library is experimenting with safe-harbor agreements with some rights holders that 

would ensure the safe transfer of digital content to the Library in case of a business 

failure. There may be so-called trigger events, such as the expiration of copyright protection, the imminent demise of a collection, the bankruptcy of the copyright holder, 

or other things that might activate a preservation intervention. This type of arrangement between owner and repository must be explored and expanded in order to find 

scalable solutions, and the Library can play a leading role in developing best practices 

that stakeholder communities endorse. 

Time and again participants in the planning process expressed concern and some 

confusion about what libraries and repositories can and cannot do legally to preserve digital content, and particularly what the Library of Congress, as the recipient 

of copyright deposit material, could do. Therefore, the Library sought to clarify the 

impact of copyright management on preservation (see Appendix 6). One of the gravest implications of the present copyright regime for long-term access to digital content 
32PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

is the sheer fragility of the information. Given how short the life span of digital content is and the length of copyright protection (to life plus 70 years), we face the very 

real prospect that the nation’s most valuable intellectual and cultural content—that 

protected by copyright—will not pass into the public domain for more than a century. 

At present, that places the burden of preserving that content on the rights holders, 

who may be unaware of the implied cultural mandate or may be ill-positioned to 

guarantee the responsibility over the long term. This is an important matter that must 

be addressed before Congress can be assured that its charge—to develop an effective infrastructure for the preservation of significant digital content—can be effected. 

While the specifics of the rights regime lie outside the scope of the Library’s NDIIPP 

mandate, the responsibility to elucidate the effects of rights protection on the integrity 

of the historical record is clearly an important component of its charge.

Current Digital Preservation Efforts

To understand further the very challenging issues of scope, collection development, 

and roles of various players in the preservation landscape, it will be helpful to review 

what was learned about the activities of other organizations in the field of digital creation and preservation.

U.S. Government

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), as the archives of the 

U.S. government, is responsible for safeguarding the records of all three branches 

of the federal government. In recognition of this mandate and significant changes 

in the federal records management environment, in which most records are now 

created digitally, NARA has embarked on a three-pronged approach to further the 

management and preservation of electronic records. NARA is in the second year of a 

multiyear project to redesign its records management program to meet the challenges 

of today’s government records. By creating mutually supporting relationships with 

agencies whereby NARA’s records management program adds value to agency business processes, records will be managed effectively for as long as they are needed, 

and records of continuing value, particularly electronic records, will be preserved and 

made available for future generations.

A key effort of the Archives is the Electronic Records Management E-Government 

Initiative, one of 24 e-government initiatives sponsored by the Office of Management 

and Budget. This initiative will provide the tools that agencies will need to manage 

their records in electronic form, addressing specific areas of electronic records management where agencies are having major difficulties. This project will provide government-wide guidance on electronic records management and will enable agencies 

to transfer electronic records to NARA in a variety of data types and formats so that 

they may be preserved for future use by the government and citizens.

NARA, the managing partner for this initiative, is working with several other agencies to integrate electronic records management concepts and practices with com-
33PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

prehensive information management policies, processes, and objectives to assure 

the integrity of electronic records and information. It is also focused on employing 

electronic records management to support interoperability, timely and effective decision-making, and improved services to customers. Finally, NARA will provide the 

tools for agencies to access electronic records for as long as required and to transfer 

permanent electronic records to NARA for preservation and future use by government and citizens. 

The Electronic Records Archives (ERA) Program is NARA’s strategic response to the 

long-term preservation of electronic records. Its goal is to enable NARA to preserve 

and provide access to virtually any type of electronic record created by the federal 

government. ERA must be inherently responsive to known problems associated with 

electronic records and adapt to new and unpredictable challenges and opportunities 

that will arise as information technology and its application in government continue 

to evolve. The resulting system will have three primary characteristics: It must be persistent; it must preserve authentic records; and it must be scalable.

To develop and build ERA, NARA is collaborating with government, industry, academic, and international partners who are leading the way in developing the nextgeneration national information structure. The system will be scalable both upward to 

meet NARA’s exponentially growing workload, and downward so it will be useful to 

smaller archives, libraries, universities, and businesses. The technology developed for 

ERA will provide a common framework for all agencies in managing their electronic 

records for as long as needed in conducting their business. ERA will maximize the 

use of government and commercial off-the-shelf components, be developed in a series 

of fully funded usable increments, and use performance-based contracting methods. 

Currently, the ERA Program is continuing research and development, documenting 

system requirements, completing an analysis of alternatives, and developing a business case analysis. 

In addition to NARA, the Library also interviewed representatives of some of the 

other federal agencies concerned with preserving digital records, in particular the 

Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 

the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), National Agricultural Library (NAL), and National Library of Medicine (NLM). 

The interrelationships among mission, organization, and technology surfaced in the 

interviews and review of materials provided by the agencies. Representatives from 

other agencies emphasized the technological challenges and the importance of maintaining internal technological capability. This expertise is not required to build and 

maintain proprietary systems but is essential to identifying and evaluating the utility of systems and tools that may be available or customized to meet the specialized 

needs of libraries and archives. One of those interviewed advised that the Library 

should either ramp up its internal capabilities and technical infrastructure or find a 

reliable partner. Representatives were also emphatic on the importance of a clearly 

defined mission. 
34PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

Mission shapes organizational relationships, and those relationships, in turn, affect 

how technologies and technological solutions may be evaluated and crafted. Several 

agencies are accumulating substantial hands-on experience with data accessioning 

and validation from multiple sources as well as with metadata, bibliographic utilities, 

and so on. 

Other topics specific to NDIIPP that surfaced consistently in these discussions 

include: the importance of information security; the utility of a test bed in one of the 

nonprint formats (for example, music), which would be hard enough to push the 

technology but not so hard as to be intractable; the importance of meeting Congressional needs relating to information capture and the business of government (for 

example, archiving Thomas, a legislative information Web site [thomas.loc.gov]) and 

of addressing long-term preservation of copyrighted materials; and the importance 

of access as a feature of a digital preservation strategy. Finally, several agencies have 

programmatic commitments to the professional development of archivists and librarians, including training that is tailored to digital resources. 

The Library of Congress will benefit from the examples that NARA, NLM, and NAL, 

among others, have set in developing organizational responses to the need for a distributed information architecture. 

U.S. Libraries

The survey of members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), undertaken 

in October 2001 at the request of the Library and in support of the NDIIPP planning, 

found that most of the 67 libraries that responded are currently preserving or intending to preserve a mix of born-digital and digitized materials that were created by the 

libraries themselves. The libraries cope with a range of objects—dissertations, online 

serials, various “Web collections,” social science-economic data, electronic student 

records, and so forth—in which the data are in a mix of relatively common formats. 

A handful of libraries have policies and practices in place; others are developing them 

either in isolation or collaboratively. Many are still working out best practices and 

looking to other libraries, including the Library of Congress, to model those practices 

and develop standards.

These libraries identify as critical the need for staff training and development. The 

Library has been a resource for development and dissemination of best practices in 

preservation of analog collections, and it should be positioned to assume that role in 

the digital realm. 

Along with the Library of Congress, there is a set of leading research libraries 

looked to for development of dissemination of best practices in the digital realm, the 

members of the Digital Library Federation (DLF). Twenty-four nonfederal members 

of DLF were also surveyed (see Appendix 4). Respondents indicated collection/

preservation priorities that were consistent with the priorities adopted by ARL 

members, namely: 
35PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

• institutional records,

• digital materials received as part of heterogeneous archival collections,

• locally hosted e-journals, and 

• materials created or collected by local faculty (working papers, databases, converted textual documents) and other local materials (for example, dissertations, 

local Web sites, student portfolios, and learning or classroom objects).

The number of Digital Library Federation activities relevant to NDIIPP mentioned 

by respondents is striking. Four institutions are involved in an e-journal archiving 

program that partners with commercial and nonprofit publishers. There are, in addition, repository systems oriented toward digital preservation available or under development at the several major public and private universities, with one even pursuing 

the construction of a service to provide long-term archiving for external depositors. 

Finally, one research library is engaged in investigating ways of evaluating preservation risks for Web-based resources.

The survey indicates that there is a set of research libraries that would be natural 

partners to the Library of Congress in the creation of a national cooperative plan for 

digital preservation. These institutions have already identified sets of digital resources 

for which they expect to take responsibility, are creating the infrastructures to support digital preservation activities, and have expressed a willingness to work with the 

Library in this domain.

Private Sector

Yearlong consultations with representatives from the private sector added another 

dimension to the overall environmental review. This sector agreed upon the need 

for the Library to be a convener and facilitator in this new information space. This is 

especially critical in the arena of standards, for, as one publisher noted, it may be in 

industry’s interest to develop a common standard, but he feared that others who felt 

left out would accuse the industry of collusion. If the Library were to endorse and 

adopt some standards, it would increase their durability and credibility. There is also 

a lack of common practice among publishers and media companies about what gets 

preserved in-house. Some save just text files, others also save graphics and illustrations, but do not save drafts or correspondence. Some recording companies save 

graphics as well as new output, but others do not. Under these circumstances, what is 

happening to the raw history of creativity? Publishers and studios do not behave like 

preservationists—and will not—but they understand the importance of some third 

party taking responsibility for saving the historical record. 

Yet another reason for the general approval of NDIIPP among the creative industries 

is their fear that back-up systems might fail: They would welcome a disaster-recovery 

backup that would be one part of that preservation infrastructure. It was even noted 

that industry needs access to outmoded software just as libraries do, and one individual suggested that, were NDIIPP to provide for archiving of software for access 

formats, his firm would pay a fee to use them.
36PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

There was a clear sense among the private sector representatives that what gets 

preserved for posterity is something different from what they are best positioned to 

preserve within their own industries. Saying that they would like to align business 

and cultural interests means cooperating with the heritage sector, not taking on those 

responsibilities alone. And, finally, it was clear that innovation in technology will 

continue to come from the private sector, for, as someone from a technology company noted, libraries are seldom able to offer competitive compensation for highly 

skilled technologists. 

International Libraries

A survey of the leading international developments in digital preservation commissioned for NDIIPP reveals that the problems discussed throughout this report are 

shared across the globe (see Appendix 5). No library environment abroad is comparable to that in the United States, in part because of the de facto, not de jure, nature 

of the Library of Congress as the national library; its different governance and funding; the unique role of the Copyright Office in the Library; and the Library’s inclusion 

of essentially all major nongovernmental information formats, from maps to moving 

images. Nevertheless, there are many areas of common experience, concern, and 

potential collaboration among libraries across the globe. Chief findings of the survey 

include: 

• the technology is revolutionary, not evolutionary, 

• collecting patterns are shifting from purchase to license,

• digital preservation is poorly funded, often relying on soft funds,

• solutions require collaboration and coordination among many partners,

• collaboration is difficult, 

• it is easier to collaborate on research than on policies (because external funding 

encourages collaboration on research),

• coordinated collection development is advisable but difficult to achieve and 

sustain,

• nowhere do comprehensive legal provisions for archiving of digital publications 

exist, and 

• the scope of collecting is affected by the information explosion.

Finally, and crucially, “digital preservation relies substantially on the collaboration 

of key stakeholders outside the memory institutions and the professional sectors they 

represent. An important part of digital preservation activity as a public good is funded 

either from public funds by government or through private benefactors. However, 

awareness of digital preservation issues among the public, government, and other 

key stakeholders remains low” (see Appendix 5, page 133). There is nothing comparable to the Congressional action and funding taken on behalf of digital preservation 

abroad, and NDIIPP has generated great enthusiasm overseas for the attention it 
37PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

draws and resources it musters to this issue. Areas of potential initial collaboration 

with the United States include: 

• technical research,

• standards development,

• collection development, and 

• development of shared services needed by repositories.

National libraries indicated that there is significant scope for international collaboration and potential cost benefits in developing preservation services on a shared basis.

39

Future Environment

The extensive planning and consultation in this first phase of NDIIPP included: 

stakeholder meetings and interviews that addressed the issues affecting their enterprise’s future; a parallel effort at conceptualizing the environment in which digital 

preservation occurs; and advice from expert technologists and legal scholars about 

possible and probable trends in their areas of knowledge. These activities yielded 

much rich information that then served as the foundation for developing future scenarios, in which participants identified the driving forces that may shape the future 

environment in which preservation will play out. Given the complexity of the digital 

environment—one in which preservation of and access to digital content involves a 

significant number of actors working in a network—it becomes especially important 

to understand how the nature of future events could affect the strength and flexibility 

of that infrastructure to withstand various disturbances. Individuals and institutions 

consulted by the Library were asked to identify what outside factors are most likely 

to affect the viability of the digital preservation infrastructure, and what kind of infrastructure would thrive under even the most adverse circumstances.

Among the driving forces in the near-term future that will affect whatever infrastructure is developed to preserve digital content are:

• technological change,

• national and global economics,

• national and global politics,

• national security,

• copyright, and 

• regulatory changes (such as encryption, classification, privacy).

Several executives in the publishing and media industry pointed out that issues of 

trust were paramount in determining the future. The real barriers to their digital 

Implications for the Future
40PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

enterprises’ success at the moment are the lack of business models that guarantee that 

an investment in the new technologies would pay off. Until the time that such models 

emerged and were tested in the marketplace, content creators and distributors would 

feel economically vulnerable, even when they were not. Competition could drive out 

the collaboration all acknowledge is necessary at this point. 

As long as trust remains a scarce commodity in the digital landscape, each new technological innovation is likely to have unintended and often negative impacts on the 

techniques available for archiving. This was remarked in the National Academy of 

Sciences report on copyright, The Digital Dilemma, and it remains a serious driving 

force in any future scenario that must be considered.

There is no way to predict how the future will unfold, of course. The Library recognizes the need to track the evolving circumstances at home and abroad that can have 

decisive yet unanticipated effects on the preservation mission. What is described 

below is the best thinking at present about how these various influences may play 

out and affect the digital preservation infrastructure and the role the Library can and 

should play in it.

Plausible Scenarios 

Scenario planning is a process that enables organizations to learn and adapt to 

change by creating several possible alternative futures. By generating divergent 

scenarios, organizations can think beyond any preconceived notions of the future 

instead of trying to find a single “right answer” for today that risks being obsolete by 

the time the future arrives. The Library, as a cultural heritage institution that is conservative by nature and has succeeded for generations by creating and adhering to 

standards that work well in the analog realm, is particularly vulnerable to the temptation to think in one direction only about the future. The scenario planning exercise 

pushed the Library and its partners to consider the effects of driving forces over 

which the preservation community has no control, such as technology advances, the 

global economy, international instability, the digital rights regime, and others. 

Scenario planning was staged over several meetings. The first session required participants to think most broadly, expand the parameters under consideration, and identify 

three different scenarios to investigate. Subsequent sessions drilled down to what the 

consequences of the scenarios would be like on the ground. The meetings brought 

together a mix of experts from within the preservation community, broadly defined, 

and digital librarians, computer scientists, media and publishing executives, and engineers and technologists.

Preliminary findings of the first scenario planning session in February 2002 further 

confirmed the sense taken away from the stakeholder meetings the previous November: that is, the problem of digital preservation is urgent; can be addressed only by a 

distributed, decentralized, and networked infrastructure; and collaboration among all 

stakeholders to share the responsibility for the fate of digital culture can and should 

be catalyzed by the Library of Congress as representative of the public interest. 
41PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

There was consensus that the Library has a critical role to play in all three scenarios 

addressing the future of digital preservation, but they vary significantly in scope and 

influence. They are:

• the Library focusing on preserving the most critically endangered materials, acting 

in an environment without many partners,

• the Library playing a clearinghouse role in a landscape populated by several distributed repositories with well-defined preservation responsibilities and in need of 

close coordination,

• the Library, operating in an environment with maximum participation of stakeholders in preservation, facilitating the development of technical standards, intellectual property agreements, and business models that are robust, diverse, and 

serve to undergird a “peer-to-peer” system of comprehensive preservation.

In no scenario does the Library itself “save everything” or collect universally. The 

issues involved in replicating in the digital arena the comprehensiveness of the 

Library’s physical heritage assets are far too complex to envision in the foreseeable 

future. Significant differences in key investments and competencies are required of 

the Library in each scenario. As the universe of preserved collections increases, moving from the first scenario of circumscribed activities to the third of large-scale preservation by many communities, the centrality of the Library as a repository decreases, 

and its role as facilitator, honest broker, and strong focusing actor increases.

In many ways, it is best to look at the three scenarios as a progression of evolving 

roles and responsibilities within changing environments. The first scenario envisions 

a bad economic and/or regulatory climate when resources flowing in for the support of the public good are scarce and when the intellectual property rights regime 

or national security regulations also restrict the flow of information resources in the 

marketplace of ideas. In this scenario, the Library is one of only a few key institutions 

in the network of preservation actors. 

The third scenario, which envisions the best of economic times, occurs when confidence in both the public and the private sectors is high, trust among players in the 

information landscape is also high, and when people are motivated to cooperate out 

of their enlightened self-interest. In these circumstances, the Library will continue 

to be responsible for the collection and curation of the digital objects that fall under 

its collecting policies. But it will also play an expanded leadership role because there 

will be a wider group of preservation parties coming from increasingly disparate 

communities. These groups will need an honest broker who defines best practices 

for archiving different formats, who works closely with industry in test-driving new 

preservation technologies and end-user services, and who keeps the institutions 

and third parties in the digital preservation infrastructure connected and informed. 

One Internet entrepreneur optimistically speculated that under these circumstances, 

the Library could even help industry by ensuring the privacy and integrity of their 

information assets and thereby helping to generate revenue, which could in turn be 

used to support the digital preservation infrastructure through tax incentives or other 

mechanisms.
42PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

With great consistency the Library heard again and again that in this new information 

environment, trust is the necessary force to build a resilient digital preservation network and keep it together, and that the development of trust among players is a key 

role for the Library. As the preservation safety net grows and strengthens, the Library 

will need to find other libraries, repositories, and proven service providers that can 

play the same role of trusted third party, since centralization of deposit and access at 

one site, even the Library of Congress, is neither feasible nor desirable. Especially in 

the early development phases, trust must be there for the participants to feel comfortable trying out their new roles. This will be a crucial role for the Library in the following phases of implementation of NDIIPP. Experts asserted unanimously that trust 

cannot be built or guaranteed through technological warrants alone, though they 

have their roles in authorizing access and other matters. Trust adheres in people and 

in organizations, and the Library is widely viewed by stakeholders in its traditional 

role as third party that would act for the public good, as an extension of Congress. In 

some ways the Library’s role as a trusted third party means it is scripted into certain 

roles under all conditions, but that role becomes especially important in periods of 

uncertainty.

In each possible future, the Library will collect and preserve critically important digital content; will be a portal to material in high demand but not take responsibility 

for preserving it; and will be a key enabler of the work of others. Again, this result 

echoed the discussions held in November among the stakeholders (see Appendix 

2, pages 17–24). In the areas of technology, intellectual property rights and access, 

payment and business models, the Library was seen as being one of a number of 

key players, but not the most powerful. In the fourth area of concern—roles, scope, 

and collection development—the Library was cast in the leading role in everybody’s 

vision of the future. These issues seemed particularly hard to sort through for many 

because of the overwhelming scale of information production made possible by a 

technology that we do not yet fully understand. 

Collection development—who collects what for whom in what format—is especially 

fraught with ambiguity and some frank anxiety. Unlike the contentious issue of copyright, for example, there are no laws that can be enacted or revoked to give parameters for good behavior. Yet because of the ephemeral nature of the data, if we make 

mistakes about collection development now, we are unlikely to get a second chance 

to collect in the future. A digital file cannot sit neglected on a bookshelf for 200 years 

before someone discovers its value. By then it will be corrupted or trapped in an 

obsolete software encoding. All who were consulted during this phase of planning 

declared that collection development is clearly in the portfolio of libraries, chiefly 

because we must rely on experience and judgment for making decisions about selection. Those who took part in the scenario planning were especially keen to see the 

third, most inclusive scenario, come into being, for they want to ensure access to the 

widest possible field of resources to those generations who follow. Collection development is clearly an area that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later, even if 

we cannot expect easy answers.
43PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

Again, in each possible future for preservation, individuals and companies expressed 

general willingness to try out new roles because there is a consensus that the problems are real. For example, entertainment media and publishers said that repositories 

do not need to be “dark” (that is, without access to anyone), but companies do need 

to control the terms of access for purposes beyond those served by preservation. At 

the second scenario planning workshop in late April 2002, many of the participants 

expressed interest and willingness to undertake some pilot projects under the auspices of NDIIPP in order to test out new technologies, new approaches, and new 

roles. They expect the Library to facilitate those pilots. 

As noted at various stakeholder meetings and workshops, the Library should play 

the role of “stimulator of initiatives and a consumer of successful technologies.” The 

Library will need to leverage both federal funds, such as those at NSF, and private 

funds to build knowledge and bring those with expertise to bear on germane issues. 

45

A year of consultation and information gathering has confirmed widespread

agreement on the urgency of addressing the preservation of digital heritage. There is 

consensus among stakeholders that the problems are complex and occur on many 

levels—technical, legal, social, economic, intellectual—and therefore the solutions 

must be equally nuanced and multivalent. The preservation infrastructure must be 

responsive to new findings that will be generated by the research community but 

developed and operationalized in other arenas.

It is also clear that there is a continuing need on the part of all partners in preservation to build and support a strong communication effort that helps raise awareness of 

what is at stake, that catalyzes actions among preservation partners, and encourages 

NDIIPP Strategic Direction and 

Plans for Action

Figure 4. Strategic Direction

VISION

PRESERVATION INFRASTRUCTURE

Preservation

Network

Preservation

Architecture

VALUES

• Support the needs of multiple 

communities over long periods of time

• Respond to rapidly changing 

technologies and innovative behaviors

• Be transparent and trustworthy

Ensure access over time to a rich body of digital 

content through the establishment of a 

national network of committed partners

Two key components of infrastructure: 

Preservation Network: Partners collaborating to preserve 

and provide long-term access to digital content and 

Preservation Architecture: Technical components 

that enable digital preservation
46PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

all who benefit from access to digital content to support preservation. For without 

preservation, there will be no access. 

Strategic Direction 

The vision of NDIIPP is to ensure access over time to a rich body of digital content 

through the establishment of a national network of committed partners, collaborating in a digital preservation architecture with defined roles and responsibilities. 

The creation of such a system will occur incrementally, because of the complexity of 

the challenge and the number and diversity of actors involved. To realize this vision, 

the Library of Congress will take actions that are: 

• catalytic: investing in existing strengths, leveraging public and private investments, and stimulating research and development where needed,

• collaborative: engaging willing partners and key stakeholders in areas of mutual 

interest and expertise,

• iterative: learning from the initial planning and fact-finding to inform subsequent 

actions and investments, and continuing to feed results back into the chain of 

research, testing, and development, and

• strategic: addressing a broad spectrum of issues in technology, collection development, infrastructure and organization, intellectual property, technical standards, 

and other key components of the preservation network through a balance of early 

short-term and long-term actions and investments.

This digital preservation infrastructure will neither be built quickly nor be completed 

at a foreseeable end date, as the infrastructure is by design a dynamic and everadapting system. 

Box 2. Expected Outcomes

Through the execution of the NDIIPP initiative, the Library expects to have reached a 

number of outcomes. There will be:

• a clearer definition of the roles and responsibilities of partners in the preservation 

network,

• the establishment and deepening of relationships among key partners in the private and public sectors, including international institutions,

• the clarification of intellectual property issues that impede preservation, together 

with recommendations to address them,

• the creation of an advanced design for the digital architecture,

• the identification of a next set of investments to advance NDIIPP goals,

• the encouragement of an advanced research agenda for preservation of digital 

content, and

• raised awareness among key stakeholders and the general public about the challenges and opportunities of digital preservation.
47PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

The Library’s plans for action over the next three to five years of NDIIPP will comprise investments and activities that will preserve digital content, build a resilient 

network of digital preservation partnerships, and begin development of the digital 

preservation architecture to support and enable these goals.

Development of the Digital Preservation Infrastructure

The digital preservation infrastructure must be flexible, responsive to innovation 

without becoming anarchic, and be accountable and transparent before all the stakeholders. Specifically, the national preservation infrastructure must: 

• support the needs of multiple communities over long periods of time,

• respond to rapidly changing technologies and innovative behaviors, and 

• be transparent and trustworthy.

These are the core values that define NDIIPP’s plans for action. NDIIPP will start 

building a preservation network of committed partners around a collaborative preservation architecture with defined roles and responsibilities through investments and 

actions on two broad fronts:

• core capacities crucial for collaboration among institutions (the shared knowledge, expertise, skills, and consensus regarding essential areas of concern that 

support the digital preservation framework) and

• the digital preservation architecture needed to operate the network.

Core Capacities of the Digital Preservation Network

Major actions in developing a strategy for collecting, preserving, and ensuring rightsprotected access to digital content will be a series of collaborative initiatives, catalyzed by the Library of Congress. These actions take advantage of opportunities and 

demand a high-level commitment of certain types of capital—primarily the time and 

expertise of groups with curatorial, legal, financial, economic, sociological, and other 

analytical skills. Among the issues identified through NDIIPP consultations and 

research that demand action are:

• selection and collection development,

• intellectual property,

• business models,

• standards and best practices, and

• communication and outreach.

Selection and Collection Development

Among collaborative actions in the area of selection and collection development to 

be undertaken are:
48PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

• developing cooperative agreements between national libraries about the scope of 

collecting national materials, both Web-based and licensed, 

• developing cooperative collecting agreements with libraries, archives, and other 

collecting institutions in the public and private sectors, 

• convening experts to develop guidelines for assessing content for enduring value, 

• convening experts to examine curatorial best practices for selecting dynamic 

objects, such as Web-based journals, GIS materials, interactive objects, and other 

genres,

• defining the boundaries of Web-based content for preservation purposes, and 

• reviewing collection development policies, including those for best edition necessary for mandatory copyright deposit, in order to bring them up to date for digital 

materials.

Selection of digital content begins with identifying material for accessioning, assessing its long-term value, ensuring its completeness and authenticity, determining the 

most appropriate formats for acquisition, and considering the impacts of various 

preservation strategies, such as migration or emulation, on the longevity of the digital 

object. Selection also includes the development of institutional collection policies 

(and making those commitments widely known), and then defining coordinated collecting and preserving responsibilities among key stakeholders.

The expertise of curators found in libraries, archives, museums, and other collecting 

institutions must be brought to bear on the variety of new forms of expression in the 

digital realm (streaming audio and visual content, for example), capturing them as 

quickly as possible and assessing their short-term use and long-term value, and calculating their preservation requirements.

In addition, the research agenda for selection identified by NSF and the Library 

includes the development of cost-benefit models to inform decisions about preservation formats and standards, choices of preservation strategies (normalization, 

migration, emulation), and the costs and benefits of various levels of description 

and metadata. These are all important criteria that will powerfully influence collecting decisions, especially in the realm of complex digital objects in which matching a 

preservation strategy to an object requires a keen understanding of the most valuable 

features of that object. Is a digital video clip important chiefly for its informational 

value, as it would be if it were a news report or a video of a choreography? Or are the 

aural and visual elements more important to preserve through (more expensive) high 

sampling rates and uncompressed storage, as would be the case in digital art? Each 

type of digital content must be defined for its long-term value and will have its own 

preservation requirements.

Finally, the Library of Congress will undertake, in consultation with national and 

international collaborators, a definition of what constitutes a best edition, that is, 

what should be deposited for copyright, in what format, and under what conditions. 

There is also a need to explore the deposit of copyright materials at authorized third-
49PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

party agents of the Library, as is done in European countries, to handle the unprecedented volume of material that is copyrighted and worthy of long-term preservation.

Assessing the appropriate formats to accession, deciding how to preserve and provide 

access, determining which techniques are appropriate for preserving objects—these 

are crucially dependent on anticipated use. How users interact with a certain database, for example, depends on whether they are geographers, genealogists, biologists, 

or a seventh-grade history class. That said, there has been little applied research to 

date about the use of digital heritage content, in sharp contrast to such studies in the 

private sector. NDIIPP should engage these issues in the next phase as well.

Intellectual Property

An overview of the complex effects that copyright has on the fate of digital preservation can be found in Appendix 6. Among recommendations cited in the study that 

will be acted on, as appropriate, are:

• investigation of the options and authorities necessary for the Library of Congress 

to preserve digital content captured on the Internet,

• investigation of what are acceptable methods of access to digital content for educational purposes within a library setting,

• investigation of the implications of mandatory deposit for digital content,

• investigation of the implications of various security and protection devices for 

preservation, and 

• development of a better understanding of the international context of copyright, 

jurisdiction, responsibility, and reach of applicable law, possibly in cooperation 

with other national libraries and multinational publishing and media industries.

Intellectual property issues were cited again and again in the consultations the 

Library conducted as among the most challenging of all the barriers that now impede 

the progress toward preserving digital heritage. One of the guiding principles of this 

initial fact-finding and planning phase of NDIIPP has been to bracket the concerns 

that owners and users have about access in order to give preservation priority in the 

discussions. But that separation between preservation and access cannot be maintained forever, in large part because crucial decisions about what to preserve and 

how depend entirely on for whom the digital assets are being preserved. The Library 

of Congress, home of the U.S. Copyright Office, is uniquely positioned to address the 

continuing need for rights-protected access to information. 

Business Models

Among actions in the area of business models to be undertaken by the Library and its 

partners are:

• identification of incentives for institutions to undertake preservation,

• identification of incentives for creators to deposit content, 
50PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

• development of metrics for costs and benefits of digital preservation, 

• development of metrics for appraising digital works for purposes of insurance and 

tax, and

• development of model safe-harbor agreements for those materials that are preserved by commercial entities or others that may not be best positioned to ensure 

longevity. 

Research and testing of economic models and policies is a crucial need for the development of a sustainable digital preservation infrastructure. Some of the key research 

areas include: the costs of acquisition and preservation; financial and other incentives 

for creators to deposit their work in a repository; the costs of standardization of formats to optimize preservation; and who should bear these costs at which stages of the 

digital object life cycle. 

Because incentives for long-term preservation of digital information vary greatly 

among the communities creating and using digital assets, a rich menu of incentives 

that would encourage organizations to develop digital archiving capabilities, build 

repositories, provide archiving services, and to create content in ways that facilitate 

its long-term preservation should be modeled and tested. “A variety of mechanisms 

warrant investigation, including direct public subsidies, tax incentives for placing 

content in the pubic domain prior to the expiration of copyrights, philanthropic 

donations, and market mechanisms that provide for cost recovery or revenue streams 

to support the repository” (see Appendix 7, page 216). 

The Library and its partners should identify a range of incentives that may encourage 

creators to deposit digital content in a repository as well. This is an arena in which 

we already know trust is a deciding factor, but we have little empirical evidence 

about how trust is engendered and maintained through past performance, up-to-date 

security systems, transparent behaviors in enforcing rules and agreements, and other 

factors possibly not yet identified. Depositors must have a very high level of trust in 

a repository, based on sophisticated use of security technologies, a track record of 

sound performance, and consistent application of rules and agreements.

The Library was advised by many stakeholders that it will be important to craft safeharbor agreements in which proprietary digital assets can be maintained by the owner 

and yet dependably transferred to a trusted repository. Understanding what constitutes a trustworthy repository will be important to develop such agreements. Finally, 

much research is still needed in the area of metrics, since we presently lack reliable 

and objective ways to measure the costs, benefits, and value of digital content.

Standards and Best Practices

Activities that the Library will continue to lead or initiate are:

• coordinating and documenting standards that support key preservation services, 

such as metadata and persistent identifier schemes,

• fostering research and best practice recommendations for formats and encoding 

schemes,
51PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

• fostering research and development of strategies, such as migration and emulation, that will ensure sustainability of digital content, and 

• developing a communication strategy to track technology changes and their 

impact on preservation.

Standards for data formats, data models, metadata, and other aspects of digital 

information are commonly cited as essential to collaborative partnerships engaged 

in digital preservation. Longevity of digital data and the ability to read those data 

in the future depend upon standards for encoding and describing, but standards 

change over time. Research on the evolution of standards is required to understand 

the impact of standards changes on long-term preservation methods and practices. 

The Library is the maintenance organization for descriptive metadata standards, a 

role it has played in the realm of print media for cataloging standards. As it leads a 

national digital preservation effort, the Library must monitor relevant standards not 

only concerning metadata, but also data formats, or the ways that digital information 

is encoded. 

The topic of what types of metadata are necessary to support long-term preservation 

continues to be foremost in discussions of standards. Some metadata standards for 

digital materials are emerging. The Library should continue to facilitate consensusbuilding on digital preservation metadata among the diverse communities of creators, 

libraries, and archives.

During periods of emergent standards, best practices serve the critical function of 

guiding practitioners in their decision-making. The Library can continue to support 

and play an active role in the many existing research and communication relationships that help define best practices for preservation.

Communication and Outreach

Outreach activities targeting professional and public audiences include:

• maintaining the NDIIPP Web site (www.digitalpreservation.gov), featuring current information on the program’s status,

• outreach to professional groups through participation in professional meetings 

and contributions to professional literature, and

• outreach to the public through print and Web-based general interest publications 

and through the broadcast media.

The aim of the communication and outreach program is to build a national constituency that will support NDIIPP and become active participants in preserving digital 

heritage.

The Library of Congress and its partners will engage the library and archival community, the business world, the creative community, and the general public in an effort 

to communicate the importance and urgency of preserving digital heritage. This outreach program will also encourage stakeholders to become active participants in the 

public conversation about this critical issue and to heighten awareness that preserva-
52PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

tion in the digital age must be considered at the time of creation. Preservation cannot 

be an activity relegated to the expertise of libraries and archives, but rather must be 

seen as intrinsic to the act of creation. 

Digital Preservation Architecture

The areas of engagement discussed above are designed to start building a strong 

network of committed preservation partners and inform development of the digital 

preservation architecture. A parallel set of actions and investments will be directed 

toward developing the digital preservation architecture that will support that preservation network. In accordance with NDIIPP’s strategic vision, the architecture’s 

design principles support the needs of multiple communities, respond to changing 

technologies, and operate in an open and transparent manner.

The digital preservation architecture that supports the NDIIPP will specify the overall 

structure, logical components, and logical interrelationships of the system. It is especially important that the architecture design for the digital preservation infrastructure 

aid in simplifying the complexity of the environment, account for the broad capacities 

required to build a resilient and multidimensional infrastructure, and enable a wide 

range of stakeholders with different economic requirements and business models to 

participate in an integrated way.

In building a digital preservation infrastructure based on this architecture, the Library 

will:

• convene a design group to further develop the components of the preservation 

architecture,

• solicit proposals to test and model components of the system, and

• evaluate project outcomes to inform a next generation of implementations.

The next phase of NDIIPP will take the digital preservation architecture described 

below further, both by undertaking additional conceptual work with a newly convened architectural group and by applying the principles outlined here in applied 

experimentation with partner stakeholders during the next phase of NDIIPP. What 

follows is a summary of the proposed architecture and its design principles (see 

Appendix 9 for full details).

Box 3. Preservation Architecture Design Principles

The NDIIPP digital preservation architecture must:

• support relationships between institutions,

• allow questions of preservation to be handled separately from questions of access,

• be built modularly, using existing technology and efforts where possible,

• be able to be assembled over time, rather than needing to be built all at once,

• be upgradable in pieces, without disrupting the whole system, and

• be specified using broadly adoptable protocols.
53PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

The six design principles were developed in the initial planning phase by experts in 

digital libraries, computer science, and systems design. These principles collectively 

support the values of transparency, collaboration, incremental development, stability, 

flexibility, heterogeneity, and innovation. These principles suggest a flexible approach 

based on modular development in order to accommodate these seemingly disparate 

values while ensuring overall coherence by engaging many different stakeholders to 

work on different pieces of the architecture.

Consistent with the design principles described above, the group of technical experts 

have articulated a four-layer preservation architecture that assumes that NDIIPP 

will be built over time, and that its construction will involve both public and private 

institutions as well as the Library. It also assumes that the digital preservation infrastructure will never achieve stasis, but will instead evolve continually to integrate new 

forms of hardware and software, easily integrate new preservation partners, and preserve digital material of new formats and types.

In order to accomplish these ends, the architecture proposes four layers, with each 

layer comprising a different set of functions, governed by a related set of rules for use. 

These layers and their interconnections are designed to allow the preservation community to customize the architecture to its particular needs, and to make it possible 

to adjust the architecture as those needs change. 

The proposed architecture has four layers:

• a Repository layer, for the 

long-term storage of digital 

data,

• a Gateway layer, which provides protection and control 

for the Repositories,

• a Collection layer, where 

agreements and decisions 

about the acquisition, access, 

and context of preserved digital materials are made, and 

• an Interface layer, where 

those materials that patrons 

are allowed to access are 

made available.

This architecture creates an 

unbundling of the functions currently associated with libraries 

and other organizations such as business archives and museums. The separation of 

people from the “bits” that make up digital objects illustrated in Figure 5 is analogous 

to a library patron seeking to use a rare book kept in a secure vault. Instead of turning to the card catalog to find the entry for the book (the bibliographical record at the 

Interfaces

Collections

Gateways

Repositories

Figure 5. Four Layers Between People and Bits
54PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

Collection layer), then asking the librarian (at the Gateway layer) to retrieve the book 

from the vault (the Repository layer), the user is now able to have access potentially 

to many digital objects in many different repositories, with the crucial cataloging, 

gateway, and repository functions enabled through the network. No one layer has 

the all the functions of the contemporary library, but each layer has some of those 

functions. In this system, preservation is a process that involves many stakeholders at 

various levels. The system as a whole provides the balance between access, control, 

and preservation. 

Each of these four layers can be as open or closed as required, based on agreements 

made between the rights holders and the preserving institutions, so that anything 

from public-domain to commercially valuable material can be preserved, with terms 

and conditions of access being applied per item, rather than per archive or across the 

whole system. 

Work can commence on individual pieces of the system without requiring that all the 

pieces interact with one another from the outset. The Collection layer, for example, 

will require significant work on principles of digital acquisition, including documenting and storing information about the format and playback software for collected 

digital materials. Likewise, the Repository layer will require a set of best practices for 

avoiding or recovering from hardware and media failures. However, these projects 

can be undertaken separately, by different institutions, and integrated into the system 

as a whole over time. A key part of NDIIPP’s next phase will be to test the architecture’s assumptions in practical implementations, as well as to convene a second 

group to create a more detailed iteration.

NDIIPP Management 

Options for the long-term management of a national network of public-private partners must be carefully considered during the execution of the initial NDIIPP investments and actions. The Library proposes to employ the advice and counsel of its 

National Digital Strategy Advisory Board executive committee to help identify the 

options to be brought forward for Congressional review. Subsequent investments 

in building and developing a national strategy for collecting and preserving digital 

content may necessarily need oversight that includes representatives of the various 

stakeholder communities. It is the Library’s intention to examine and recommend a 

management approach that optimizes the important investment being made in longterm preservation of our cultural heritage.
55

The Library of Congress proposes to invest Congressional and matching

funds in a series of activities and programs that begin to realize the vision of securing our digital heritage. Public Law 106-554 appropriated $100 million to the Library 

of Congress for NDIIPP. (A rescission of $220,000 in another section of the same 

law reduced the amount appropriated to $99,780,000.) Of this amount, $5 million 

was made available immediately. The remaining $95 million is available following 

approval of this plan by the Library’s Congressional oversight committees (authorizing and appropriations) and approval before expenditure by the House and Senate Appropriations committees. The law further stipulates that of the $95 million, 

$75 million may not be expended without matching contributions from nonfederal 

sources. 

Concurrent with the submission and approval of this plan, the Library is seeking 

Congressional authorization to utilize the $95 million made available, but we are only 

seeking authority from the Appropriations committees to expend at this time $35 million to fund key practical experiments and work that will help provide a foundation 

for building the digital preservation infrastructure.

Initial investments will focus on four core capacities—selection and collection development, intellectual property, business models, and standards and best practices—as 

well as the preservation architecture. They will comprise a balanced portfolio of 

short-term and long-term projects that include practical applications and models 

together with applied and basic research. Near-term investments have anticipated 

time frames of one to two years, mid-term investments will be realized in two to five 

years, and long-term investments will exceed five years. 

We expect the investments in practical applications and models to begin to both 

capture significant and at-risk content and to establish the core capacities of the 

preservation network based on actual experience. For example, this work will lead to 

priority policy decisions in such key areas as the desired digital formats for copyright 

Management of the Initial NDIIPP 

Investment Portfolio
5

6PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

Figure 6. Investment in the Digital Preservation Infrastructure—Sample Projects and Anticipated Time Frames

SAMPLE PROJECTS WITHIN INFRASTRUCTURE COMPONENTS

BUILDING CORE CAPACITIES1. Selection and Collection Development

Prototype capture of “at-risk” and important materials by media types

2. Intellectual Property

Explore best edition of media types for content submitted through mandatory depositTest options and authorities to preserve digital content captured on the Internet

3. Business Models

Test alternative agreements and rules among actors within one repositoryTest alternative agreements and rules among actors across several repositoriesModel and test trusted repositories conceptsExplore new collection and preservation service models

4. Standards and Best Practices

Test preservation strategies for different media typesInstitute a cooperative effort to monitor and document developing preservationstandards and best practices

BUILDING PRESERVATION ARCHITECTURE

Compose current alternative architecture modelsSurvey of available technologies, approaches and toolsDefine preservation architecture requirementsDesign components of the preservation architecture

BASIC RESEARCH

YEAR ONE YEAR TWO YEAR THREE YEAR FOUR YEAR FIVE+

KEY Near Term (one to two years) Mid Term (two to four years) Long Term (more than four years)
57PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

deposit. Investments in the preservation architecture will yield, in the design phase, 

implemented protocols and system components in the mid-term. Research investments are envisioned as long-term projects that will support the strategic development of continuing digital preservation.

Initial Investment Portfolio Goals

The goals of the initial investment portfolio are to:

• target high-priority areas for action, 

• initiate new projects or leverage existing work in key areas that identify and capture significant and at-risk born digital materials,

• explore organizational and functional models and their relationships to the evolving digital preservation architecture,

• research technical issues associated with long-term preservation of digital content, 

including a variety of formats and types of content,

• examine relevant copyright issues, and

• begin building a network of economically sustainable partnerships and collaborations for the long term. 

Basic Investment Principles 

The following principles represent the goals of the NDIIPP and are consistent with its 

underlying values:

• broad scope of coverage among diverse custodians of digital content, across multiple digital media types, business models, life-cycle management phases, and 

architectural layers,

• broadly implementable open standards and adoption of protocols rather than 

adherence to any single proprietary technical solution set,

• incorporation of existing efforts, tools, protocols, technical applications, and so 

forth, rather than customized development, 

• iterative approach that will yield critical data, experience, and knowledge for 

developing subsequent strategies,

• “early-stage” or “seed capital” type investment in public-private collaborations 

that have good potential for longer-term economic sustainability beyond the public sector, thus incorporating a provision for in-kind private sector contributions 

from funding recipients whenever possible,

• periodic benchmarking built into the investment time frame to allow for portfolio assessment and evaluation; provisions made will allow for investment project 

realignments and consideration of additional fund infusions, and
58PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

• adoption of a National Science Foundation peer-review model during the project 

selection phase where practical and appropriate. 

Collectively, these principles will enable investment in a suite of projects to address 

key questions emerging from the proposed preservation architecture in ways that are 

focused, practical, and easily incorporated into the further development of the digital 

information infrastructure.

In the initial period of the NDIIPP program, we anticipate investing approximately 

$35 million in a portfolio of projects. The following table shows the recommended 

distribution of funding investments across three broad categories (described below). 

Distribution of investments is expressed as relative percentages of the portfolio. The 

planned execution period of the portfolio is three to five years. Recommended investment features, such as in-kind contribution, peer review, and funding mechanism, are 

shown where applicable in the relevant investment category. The expected number 

and dollar size of projects are expressed as an anticipated range.

Investment Categories

Three categories of investments are: practical applications and models, digital preservation architecture, and basic digital preservation research. The three broad investment categories are defined as follows:

Practical Applications and Models

The largest portion of the initial investment portfolio focuses on the capture and 

preservation of “at risk” digital and significant materials while simultaneously testing the technological and organizational framework necessary for building the digital 

Box 4. Recommended Initial Investment Portfolio

Approx. Approx. Approx. Funding

Investment Percentage of Project Dollar Number Mechanism

Category Portfolio Range of Projects and Features

Category I 70 percent $2–5 million 5 to 8 •Cooperative agreements

Practical •Peer review

Applications •In-kind contributions

and Models •Contracts

Category II 20 percent $1–3 million 1 to 3 •Contracts

Digital •Cooperative agreements

Preservation •In-kind contributions

Architecture

Category III 10 percent $2–3 million 1 to 2 •Interagency agreements

Basic Digital •In-kind contributions

Preservation

Research
59PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

information infrastructure on a nationwide scale. These Category I projects will provide practical experience in acquiring and preserving such new media types as Web 

sites, e-books, e-journals, digital television, digitally recorded sound, and digital film 

in order to ensure that the lessons of these investments are broadly applicable to a 

wide group of archival institutions and communities. This set of projects will focus 

on organizational, managerial, and usability issues and include: defining and testing trusted repository environments; establishing agreements and rules among rights 

holders, collections curators, and archival services; and performing tests that stress 

the layers of the digital preservation architecture, both across the system (say, from 

repository to repository) and up and down the system (from repository to end-user 

services). This will also include the development or deployment of new collection 

and preservation services and functions that the architecture demands for ease of use. 

All these projects intend to demonstrate how the architecture works—or falters—in 

implementations carried out by a network of participating collaborators and partners 

drawn from a diverse group of stakeholder communities. These projects will also help 

identify policy issues that need priority attention.

This is the largest and most complex set of projects, and the results of these projects 

have ramifications across a complicated set of interlocking requirements, ranging 

from the organizational to the technical to the legal to the economic. 

Digital Preservation Architecture

These investments focus on a more detailed iteration and further definition and 

design of the proposed digital preservation architecture. Activities may also include 

a parallel effort to conduct comparative surveys of the best architectural models 

that are being defined elsewhere, together with surveys of the available technologies, approaches, and tools that can support architectural components and protocols 

between architectural layers. 

Recognizing that diverse stakeholder communities and industries face common problems of accessioning, annotating, and archiving of digital materials, the Library will 

identify the best thinking on these issues and use them when advisable. The Library 

will identify and bring together the relevant technical expertise, tapping resources in 

both the public and private sector, from government, to industry, to academia. For 

example, the Library may rely on the technical resources and network of Principal 

Investigators that have worked under the auspices of the NSF Digital Libraries Initiatives. It may also rely on industry experts in the archival, library, computer science, 

publishing, recording, and movie industries.

Basic Preservation Research

A third priority, which complements the focused digital preservation architecture, 

will be basic research intentionally focused on long-term and open-ended exploration of complex issues that may not necessarily have specified outcomes. The Library 

can leverage the well-vetted digital preservation research agendas of such research 

support organizations as the National Science Foundation and the San Diego Super-
60PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

computer Center to address large-scale research issues such as automatic metadata 

generation, alternative long-term migration strategies, and the handling of dynamic 

databases, among others. The NSF’s program in digital government offers a recognized forum for arranging interagency collaborations on research problems of common concern.

Funding Mechanisms

The recommended mechanisms for providing financial resources to the project participants will balance the need for broad-based participation, fairness and equity, 

expediency, shared financial or in-kind match and contribution, assumption of joint 

responsibilities over the program duration, and reliance on preexisting core competencies. Funding mechanisms that the Library will consider using include: 

• cooperative agreements,

• interagency agreements,

• contracts (with individuals, business entities, and public and private institutions), 

and 

• peer-reviewed proposals.

We anticipate that many of the projects in the initial $35 million investment portfolio 

will include matching funding from the collaborating partners or other nonfederal 

sources. Therefore, concurrent with the submission and approval of this plan, the 

Library is seeking authority from the Appropriations committees to expend up to $15 

million only upon receipt of matching funds or in-kind contributions. Approval to 

spend these funds now will encourage private sector participation in the program and 

the prompt initiation of collaborative projects. 

Project Solicitation, Selection, and Evaluation

Solicitation

Given their scale and volume, and to build the broadest collaborative network, we 

anticipate that most of the Category I projects will be identified through a program 

solicitation process. We are exploring the possibility of employing, through an interagency agreement, the National Science Foundation to help us administer a peerreview process for selecting the most qualified projects. 

Selection Criteria for Initial Investment Portfolio

A set of criteria has been developed to select the initial investment portfolio. Not 

every project will meet all 10 criteria, but collectively the portfolio of projects should 

meet these requirements. (For further details about the criteria, see Appendix 10.)
61PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

Criterion 1: Does it preserve diverse or at-risk media?

The content that is employed in the portfolio should either test the diversity of potential types, such as dynamic data, geospatial data, or executable files—or examine ways 

that vulnerable “at risk” materials—orphan collections, ephemera, and so forth—

might be identified, captured, collected, and preserved.

Criterion 2: Does it test collaborative network models?

Given the importance of networked collaborations to the overall digital infrastructure 

building strategy, and given the range of forms in which that collaboration might be 

expressed, the Library proposes to examine different national and international collaborative network structures, relationships, and mechanisms through the various 

projects. 

Criterion 3: Is there sufficient capacity to achieve satisfactory execution 

of the project? 

The timeliness of the practical application and modeling projects require committed 

participants who are ready to engage and have identified the requirements, including 

resources, objectives, and goals of the project. 

Criterion 4: Does it address pertinent copyright concerns?

Since rights management is a significant feature of certain collections and processes, 

proposed projects must recognize relevant rights issues and should begin to craft 

solutions to aspects such as best edition definition, deposit mechanisms, and acquisition functionality.

Criterion 5: Does it advance the development of standards and best practices?

The portfolio of projects should collectively test a range of approaches to different 

technical and organizational contexts, examine the conditions under which the different approaches should be employed, and develop sample representations of each, as 

appropriate.

Criterion 6: Does it help clarify collection selection issues?

Strategies will be required in the digital environment to ensure that the collective 

scope of the nation’s cultural heritage collections is sufficiently redundant to ensure 

safety and sufficiently broad and deep to satisfy information and research needs now 

and long into the future. 

Criterion 7: Does it test the digital preservation architecture?

The four-layer digital preservation architecture shows the relationships among the 

technical layers (Repository, Gateway, Collection, Interface) and suggests the range 
62PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

of organizations that might undertake responsibility for or provide services to different parts of the overall architecture. Because it requires cooperation across organizational boundaries, it is critical to test the digital preservation architecture in a 

collaborative environment. 

Criterion 8: Does it test scalability?

Projects that consider the implications of going from necessarily small-scale prototyping to realistically large and heterogeneous environments are essential.

Criterion 9: Does it test sustainability?

Projects that take into account best practices and other strategies for continuation 

over time will test the notion of sustainability.

Criterion 10: Does it leverage other efforts?

Existing yet uncoordinated efforts offer resources that may potentially be mobilized 

into a national system. This represents a prudent and effective investment of federal 

resources to catalyze a public-private system for the national good.

Evaluation 

Before launching the initial investment portfolio, the Library will establish an independent evaluation process to assure that the projects, once selected and funded, are 

achieving their intended objectives and to confirm the intended results of the projects. The goal is to provide monitoring and feedback that will improve the projects’ 

performance, to leverage learning across the broad spectrum of NDIIPP actions and 

investments; and to provide the objective validation of the process and outcomes that 

will assure that the investments are truly strategic and catalytic.

At the start of each project, the Library will ensure that the project objectives are 

clearly articulated and realistic, that the proposed methodology is appropriate, and 

that measurable success indicators, such as baseline information or projected benchmark outcomes, are defined. 

At the completion of each project we will measure against a set of review criteria for 

the NDIIPP. This may include validation of the original assumptions and objectives 

or comparison of project results against previously established benchmarks. 
63PLAN FOR THE NDIIPP

Box 5. Sample Project Description

What might an NDIIPP project look like? Web sites, electronic books, digital periodicals, digital television, digitally recorded sound and digital film are content forms that 

present opportunities for investigations within the portfolio of practical experiments 

that may be proposed for the NDIIPP. Any project considered would be measured 

against the 10 portfolio criteria (see Appendix 10). 

An example of a possible project would be the acquisition and preservation of electronic journals across several scholarly disciplines. Electronic journals have become a 

significant category of born-digital materials. An increasing amount of the nation’s 

intellectual and cultural heritage is embodied in this critical vehicle for scholarly communication. Not surprisingly, many research institutions, including major university 

libraries, publishers of scholarly material, and the National Library of Medicine (NLM), 

are investigating the underlying organizational, technical, business, and legal issues 

involved in archiving electronic journals. 

An electronic journals project would advance several of the portfolio criteria, including:

• testing the collaborative model by involving multiple archival institutions, publishers, technology businesses, and scholarly foundations in a network of organizations 

and services to support and implement the project,

• demonstrating sufficient capacity by proposing a focused action plan and a committed and informed team of participants,

• addressing pertinent copyright concerns by providing a forum and focus for discussions and agreements on access control policies that are key to trusted relationships that support long-term preservation, 

• clarifying the collection and management of electronic journals over time, subscribed to by multiple institutions, including issues relating to the breadth, scope, 

and use of an individual institution’s collections, 

• testing the preservation architecture by modeling the requirements and functionality for three of the four layers: Repository, Gateway, and Collection. The project 

would also include defining mechanisms for building a trusted repository environment for e-journals, 

• testing sustainability by examining and planning for long-term administrative, 

organizational, technological, business, and economic models for electronic 

journals, and

• leveraging other efforts by building upon current e-journal preservation efforts supported by scholarly and federal agencies and by identifying and employing existing 

suitable technologies.

This is an example of a conceptual project that complies with the portfolio criteria 

defined for practical experiments to test and model components of the NDIIPP preservation architecture. It does not meet all 10 criteria but could be included in a portfolio 

of 12 to 15 projects of varying size and scope that all together sufficiently address all 

the criteria. 

65

The 21st century, barely two years old, is already marked by the expectation

of great progress through technological breakthroughs, such as the decoding of the 

genome, broadened access to information through digital technology networks, and 

the promises of advances in materials science through nanotechnology. In this century, we have also seen how complex and fragile is the infrastructure that supports 

these technologies and how easily it can be abused or manipulated. This nation has 

relied on free and unfettered access to information and innovation, and it has been 

fostered, to a remarkable degree, by the library and archival network that Americans 

often take for granted. We are at a critical juncture as we witness the transition from 

the tested and trustworthy information infrastructure for analog resources to the 

promising, yet fragile, untested, and potentially insecure digital one. This transition 

will force us to make a series of important decisions about how to build a system that 

fosters creativity, protects the rights of individuals, and balances the claims both of 

creators and of users to access to information and the legacy of innovation. 

The vision of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation 

Program is to ensure access over time to a rich body of digital content through the 

establishment of a national network of committed partners, collaborating in a digital 

preservation architecture with defined roles and responsibilities. It is a vision shared 

by many. The individuals and institutions consulted in the fact-finding and planning phase of NDIIPP have shown a sophisticated and subtle understanding of the 

potential of new information technologies to foster creativity and innovation, as well 

as a keen understanding of what is at stake if we do not secure our digital heritage 

for future generations. Many expressed great willingness to work toward collaborative solutions for digital preservation. They do not underestimate the complexities of 

the digital challenge and, in spite of their urgency to begin, they do not expect simple 

answers or quick solutions. They do, however, believe that little can be accomplished 

without the steadfast stewardship of this digital preservation infrastructure by a 

trusted third party such as the Library of Congress. 

Conclusion
66PRESERVING OUR DIGITAL HERITAGE

If we engage the issues, we will begin to transform the national information infrastructure in a way that will strengthen democracy, contribute to a more robust economic climate by providing incentives for innovation and creativity, and secure the 

unbroken record of the nation’s achievements. This we can accomplish through a 

careful and consultative process of reaching out to an ever larger number of creators, 

conservators, publishers, and producers who each day make decisions about digital 

content—decisions that determine whether or not that information will survive into 

the future.

It will not be easy to engage these issues, nor will it be easy to reach all of the individuals, organizations, and nations that we must involve in forging the new network of 

digital preservation. The Library of Congress has a historical role to play in convening 

interested parties and in providing a neutral forum in which all participants can meet 

as equals. And it is committed to doing so. 

But the Library alone cannot achieve any of the aspirations that we heard over the 

course of the past year. Its power lies in its ability to listen, to learn, and to leverage 

the efforts and will of others to create an environment in which collaboration is effective and the fruits of innovation continue to accumulate in the extraordinary creative 

record of our citizens.