National Geospatial Digital Archive Taking Shape at Stanford and UCSB
by Julie Sweetkind-Singer
Library staff at Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) and the Map and Imagery Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara are completing their first year of work on a grant to create a National Geospatial Digital Archive (NGDA).
The grant was awarded in September 2004 by the Library of Congress as part of a three-year national initiative to study the issues surrounding archiving of digital content. The NGDA team is designing a preservation infrastructure and collecting materials across a spectrum of geographic formats.
The born-digital materials being collected and preserved range from LANDSAT imagery to scans of historic maps, from state-level government data to national data sets. Of particular interest is data considered to be "at-risk" due to its lack of redundancy, regular versioning, or instability of platform. Information about the program is located on the group's Web site at:
