Stanford Libraries Get NDIIPP Award to Archive Geospatial Data
by Julie Sweetkind-Singer
The Library of Congress has selected Stanford and the University of California, Santa Barbara to develop one of eight major national initiatives for digital information preservation. The Stanford/UCSB team will form a National Geospatial Federated Digital Repository to design an infrastructure and collect materials across the spectrum of geographic formats.
The Library of Congress announced the award of nearly $3M to the Stanford/UCSB partnership in Washington on September 30, 2004, culminating a nearly two-year effort to begin putting in place a series of cooperative networks of digital repositories. In December 2000, Congress authorized the Library of Congress to develop and execute a congressionally approved plan for a National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). A $99.8 million congressional appropriation was made to establish the program, which seeks to build a network of committed U.S. partners who would work through a preservation architecture with defined roles and responsibilities.
The born-digital materials to be collected and preserved by Stanford and the University of California, Santa Barbara will range from LANDSAT imagery to other cartographic content from university, corporate and government resources, as well as web sites. The Repository will preserve content vital for the study of history, science, environmental policy, urban and population studies, census construction and analysis, and other fields requiring U.S. geospatial information.
Once established, the Repository will allow Stanford Libraries' staff to offer archival solutions to other organizations and individuals that have produced important digital geographical resources considered to be at risk. The Universities of Washington and Georgia, the American Antiquarian Society, and noted collector and digital publisher David Rumsey are among those that have agreed to contribute digital resources to the Repository. State and local agencies are also targets for gathering geographical data.
Julie Sweetkind-Singer, head of the Branner Earth Sciences Library and GIS/map librarian, will be the lead for the Stanford team, which will include up to a dozen individuals at any time during the three-year project. The complete press release for this announcement was published in the October 6, 2004 issue of the Stanford Report.
