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PRESERVATION NEWS

C&RL News, November 2005
Vol. 66, No. 10

Hurricane Katrina
Walter Henry (Stanford University) has devoted a section of his CoOL (Conservation OnLine) Web site to emergency information and resources useful to library and archives professionals involved in recovery of cultural materials damaged by Hurricane Katrina. He has provided links to both emergency response documents and the Katrina-related Web sites created by organizations such as  ALA, American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC), Society of American Archivists (SAA), American Association of Museums (AAM), Heritage Emergency National Task Force, Regional Alliance for Preservation (RAP), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). In addition, AIC has created the National Collections Emergency News on CoOL to provide a clearinghouse for recovery news and authoritative information, particularly about health and safety issues.
CoOL can be found at palimpsest.stanford.edu/. The AIC’s National Collections Emergency News can be found at palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/ncen/.

RLG checklist for TDR
The Research Libraries Group (RLG) has released a draft report, “An Audit Checklist for the Certification of Trusted Digital Repositories,” for public comment. This report is the result of a joint RLG and National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) project to identify the requirements for a repository to reliably store, migrate, and provide access to digital collections. It contains a definition of the checklist’s intended audience, a description of the audit and certification process and criteria, the audit instrument, a glossary, and references.

Robin Dale, project manager, welcomes comments about the draft before mid-January 2006. In a second project, the checklist will be used to audit the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB, National Library of the Netherlands), which holds the digital archives for a number of organizations, including Elsevier Science Direct Journals, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and Portico, in its e-Depot.

A free PDF document of the report and an e-mail link for comments are available at www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=20769. More information about the RLG-NARA Digital Repository Certification Task Force is available at www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=367. More information about the KB e-Depot is available at www.kb.nl/dnp/e-depot/dm/dm-en.html.

National Digital Newspaper Project
The Library of Congress has mounted a new website for the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). It collocates general information, such as a program overview, timeline, grant application form, list of grant recipients, and press releases, with technical information, such as selection criteria, digital conversion resources, technical specifications, architecture development, NDNP workflow, and a style guide.

The NDNP is a joint project of the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an Internet-based searchable database of U.S. newspapers, with descriptive information and digitization of selected historic pages.

Over a 20-year period, this project is designed to digitize historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 in all the states and U.S. territories.
The Web site can be found at www.loc.gov/ndnp/index.html.