Digital Preservation Awards

The Library of Congress today is making awards totaling more than $14.9 million to eight institutions and their partners to identify, collect and preserve digital materials within a nationwide digital preservation infrastructure. These awards from the Library will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the winning institutions in the form of cash, in-kind or other resources. The institutions will share responsibilities for preserving at-risk digital materials of significant cultural and historical value to the nation.

Among these are the awards are a consortium created by UIC and one created by University of Michigan. The information follows.

·  Lead institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, Graduate School of Library and Information Science and National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Partners: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Tufts University Perseus Project, Michigan State University Library, and an alliance of state library agencies from Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Subject: This project will develop criteria for determining which digital materials to capture and preserve, as not all digital material can or should be preserved. These materials will include sound and video recordings, historical aerial photography, Web-based government publications from the partner states, and primary and secondary historical materials made available by the Perseus Project. Amount of award: $2,753,451.

·  Lead institution: University of Michigan Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.
Partners: The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut, the Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the Henry A. Murray Research Center at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard, the Electronic and Special Media Records Service Division of the National Archives and Records Administration and the Harvard-MIT Data Center.
Subject: These institutions will create a partnership to identify, acquire and preserve data used in the study of social science to ensure that future generations of Americans have access to this vital digital material that will allow them to understand their nation, its social organization and its policies and politics. Examples of data that will be preserved are opinion polls, voting records, large-scale surveys on family growth and income, and focused studies on effects of events such as factory closings or the need to care for aging parents. Together the partners will build a shared catalog, adopt a common standard for describing survey data and develop strategies for ensuring that the data remains available for analysis. Amount of award: $2,182,332.

Digital Preservation Awards