July/August 2010  377 C&RL News

Jane Hedberg is senior preservation program officer 
at Harvard University Library, e-mail: jane_hedberg@
harvard.edu; fax: (617) 496-8344

The Association for Library Collections and 
Distributed digital preservation
The MetaArchive Cooperative has published A 
Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation. The 
156-page book promotes the idea that repli-
cation and distribution can ensure indefinite 
preservation of digital materials and that those 
methods can be manageable and low-cost. It 
describes the philosophical basis for cultural 
organizations to participate in community-
owned distributed digital initiatives, the ar-
chitecture of distributed networks (primarily 
the LOCKSS network), the technical decisions, 
the organizational considerations, the content 
selection, preparation and management, the 
ingest, monitoring and recovery, the cache and 
network administration, and the development 
of a workable copyright practice. 

The MetaArchive Cooperative is com-
prised of more than 15 major academic and 
research libraries, including the Library of 
Congress.

The guide is available as a free PDF at 
www.metaarchive.org/GDDP.

Digital future
Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access 
through Networked Services) has published 
a white paper, “The Digital Divide: Assessing 
Organisations’ Preparations for Digital Pres-
ervation.” It summarizes the results of their 
recent market survey of 200 international 
organizations (most are located in Europe, 
but 16 percent are located in the United States 
and Canada) about their current capabilities 
and future expectations for preserving digital 
content. 

Two especially significant findings were 
the expectation that the digital content requir-
ing preservation will increase 25 fold in ten 
years and that a digital preservation policy 
is vital to developing a digital preservation 

program. The author of the white paper 
recommends that policies define goals and 
objectives, describe rationales and benefits, 
and specify staff roles and responsibilities, 
collection policies, and standards for storing, 
managing, and accessing content.

The white paper (12 pages) and the sur-
vey analysis report (57 pages) are available 
free-of-charge at www.planets-project.eu 
/publications/.

AV technical information
The Association of Moving Image Archivists 
(AMIA) has launched a new online publica-
tion, the AMIA Tech Review. It is intended to 
share information about recording technolo-
gies and techniques as analog gives way to 
digital. 

The first issue has three feature articles, 
“Negative Cutting in the Age of Digital Inter-
mediates,” “The Digital Nightmare: Practices 
to Future-Proof Your Digital Content,” and 
“Type A and The Everly Brothers Show.”

The AMIA Tech Review’s three or more is-
sues per year will be available free-of-charge 
at www.amiatechreview.com/.

Volcanoes and other threats
The Library of Congress has mounted an 
emergency preparedness leaflet, “Volcanoes 
and Risks to Repositories,” on its Web site. 
Sixteen U.S. states and two U.S. territories 
contain active or dormant volcanoes, and the 
U.S. Geological Survey considers 18 of those 
volcanoes to pose a very high threat. 

The five-page leaflet outlines most vulner-
able collection items, most frequent types of 
damage, damage prevention, basic prepa-
rations, what to do during an alert and an 
evacuation, and how to salvage your reposi-
tory and collections post-eruption.

The volcano leaflet, along with emergency 
preparedness information about hurricanes, 
floods, fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, and 
mudslides, is available free-of-charge at www.
loc.gov/preserv/emergprep/prepare.html. 

P r e s e r v a t i o n  N e w sJane Hedberg

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