Maintaining the Light: Distributed Digital Preservation of ETDs

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Maintaining the Light: Distributed Digital Preservation of ETDs

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Maintaining the Light: Distributed Digital Preservation of ETDs

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Description

Because many universities now welcome or require electronic theses and dissertations from their graduate students, institutions must ensure that these works will be at least as available and enduring as they were when libraries and archives preserved the bound print volumes on their shelves. To this end, the NDLTD sponsored an online survey to help gauge the digital library community's interest in a distributed digital preservation network (DDPN) specifically for ETDs. Over 90 institutions responded to the survey by early February 2008, including more than 30 who heard about it through the NDTLD and ETD listservs. Based on the enthusiasm expressed in the survey, the MetaArchive Cooperative (www.metaarchive.org), which successfully deploys a DDPN among six diverse institutions in the southeastern United States, is opening the Cooperative's services and resources to members of the NDLTD. This presentation will describe and compare survey responses and delineate the MetaArchive's strategic planning to-date for the ETD DDPN.

Date

2008