The focus of the Digital Preservation Network, which is being created by research-intensive universities, is “the complete digital scholarly record” and its goal is to ensure the long-term preservation of that record. Already, twenty-nine organizations have agreed to participate in start-up planning and committed “seed capital” to fund initial planning efforts. Its Brief Overview describes some of the thinking that is going into this effort, which sounds remarkably like the FDLP and what we at FGI have been advocating for the digital FDLP:
- The Digital Preservation Network: Overview of the Initiative (Feb 21, 2012). [PDF 3 pages]
Over time, reliance on common approaches, technologies and organizations creates risk of common points of failure in securing long-term preservation of the record.
To avoid the catastrophic loss of scholarship, we must build and sustain a diverse ecosystem that can ensure the survival of scholarship in digital form for future generations. We envision a system that is scalable, sustainable, and complementary to existing collection and preservation efforts–the Digital Preservation Network (DPN or Deepen).
DPN will create a federated approach to preservation of academic content. It will build upon the higher education community’s current investments to create sufficient diversity of preservation approaches to assure access to the digital scholarly record far into the future….
The objects and metadata of the scholarly record must be replicated across:
1. Diverse software architectures
2. Diverse organizational structures
3. Diverse geographic regions
4. And in the future, diverse legal/political environments (nations)…This diversity requires a supporting ecosystem for preservation that enables higher education to own, maintain and control the scholarly record throughout time. While commercial entities may partner with us to contribute to this effort at different points in time depending on priorities and business models, final control must reside with the academy.
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