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Interview with the MetaArchive Project, Page 1
Is creation of the MetaArchive a direct result of the NDIIPP award or was this a project that was already in the development stages?
While developing a digital archive and cross-institutional scholarly portal service had long been a goal and while research had already been conducted on the utility and feasibility of such a project, the creation of the MetaArchive was a direct result of the NDIIPP award.
What are some examples of at-risk materials that you will preserve?
The MetaArchive project participants are considering a range of at-risk materials to preserve, from Web-based exhibitions to datasets to creative works that were born digital. One born-digital resource being considered for preservation is Southern Spaces, Emory University’s peer-reviewed Internet journal and scholarly forum that provides open access to essays, gateways, events and conferences, interviews and performances, and annotated Weblinks on the real and imagined spaces of the American South. This journal publishes multimedia scholarship that avails itself of the possibilities of an online journal that cannot be accurately conveyed through print journals. As such, the scholarly articles in this journal are born digital and thus without analog counterparts. The fact that these at-risk digital materials also represent Southern Studies scholarship further recommends them for preservation through the MetaArchive project.
Virginia Tech’s collection of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) helped to surface the valuable data gathered and published by graduate students and has become a global resource for accessing primary research. Preserving this collection, currently stored in a broad range of formats, will help to ensure the continued viability of this important resource. Virginia Tech’s ETDs also help promote e-publishing by allowing students to convey their work through a range of multimedia. In recent years many theses and dissertations have been born digital; digital preservation is the only way to protect these at-risk materials.
Among the other at-risk collections initially identified for harvesting and preservation is Georgia Tech’s institutional repository, SMARTech (or Scholarly Materials and Research at Georgia Tech). Because this repository contains self-archived copies of pre-print publications, conference proceedings, research data, honors theses and a range of other unique scholarly materials in many different electronic formats, it represents at-risk digital collections of scholarship. Such collections are not simply valuable to the scholarly communities that access them; they are also records of the intellectual heritage of the institution.
Auburn University’s digital copies of its yearbook, Glomerata (1897 to the present), likewise are unique records of institutional history as well as at-risk digital materials. The digitized images of the Glomerata pages are stored on a single server at Auburn, with backup copies on multiple DVDs. Both methods have proven to be unreliable within the past year, and their deficiencies resulted in hours spent redoing scanning, cropping and layout. Keeping redundant copies in distributed caches would appear to be the most reliable preservation method currently available. Florida State University, which will be contributing a digital image collection of its campus architecture (the FSU Historic Photograph Collection, 1940-1990), likewise faces the problem of maintaining the integrity of these digital masters. The images are in a transitional location, awaiting streamlining into a stable digital preservation environment. They are at risk of degradation and loss because there are currently no systematic, periodic integrity verification processes.
Image masters from the Kentucky Quilt Project at the University of Louisville provide the foundation for online exhibitions and databases and, given the nature of their analog counterparts, constitute a more flexible medium for research and education in this subject area. While these materials were not born digital, they are highly valuable components of derivative digital works. Further, as David Seaman (director of the Digital Library Federation) has pointed out, digital masters are typically overlooked in preservation efforts, despite the fact that these materials are typically stored on CD-ROMs with little to no systematic checks of the data’s integrity over time.
How will these materials complement your analog archives?
The at-risk materials we are considering for preservation provide unique digital perspectives on Southern culture and history. Even those that were digitized from analog materials serve a distinct role in research and education by extending the reach and the interactive possibilities of the original materials. As an illustration, Web exhibitions may often be viewed as mere online reproductions of previous physical exhibits, when in fact these Web sites can function as classroom teaching tools, image databases for research and catalogs for planning archive visits. In this sense, the digital materials we will be preserving will extend the reach and the use of analog archives.
These at-risk materials also complement the content focus of each institution’s analog archives. For example, as part of its collection policy, Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL) gathers original works on Georgia authors; African American history and culture; the histories of Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia and the South; and the history of higher education in the South. One of the at-risk collections Emory University has already targeted for digital preservation is Southern Changes, the quarterly journal of the Southern Regional Council that for the past 20 years has served as an alternative and groundbreaking news outlet for stories on social justice in the South. A number of the digital collections that Georgia Tech is considering for preservation continue their institutional focus on architecture and urban planning: The Buildings of Georgia Tech from 1888 to1908; Photographs of the Historic American Buildings Survey Georgia; and "Splendid Growth": Architectural Drawings of the A. French Textile Building.