LC Announces Digital Preservation Partnerships

The Library of Congress announced eight partnerships August 3 as part of its new Preserving Creative America initiative, which targets the digital preservation of creative media, including movies, sound recordings, digital photography, and video games.

The library will partner with:

• the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to extend the organization’s current preservation research, which focuses on the major studios, to independent filmmakers and smaller film archives;
• the American Society of Media Photographers, to expand and promote use of guidelines for handing digital image files;
• ARTstor, to enable photographers to submit archive-ready images to repositories;
• BMS/Chace, to create a standard for managing metadata for recorded music;
• the Stock Artists Alliance, to promote the importance of metadata for long-term usability of digital photographs;
• Universal Press Syndicate, to use Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” comic strips and Pat Oliphant’s editorial cartoons to test the transfer of digital content to the Library of Congress;
• the UCLA Film and Television Archive, to promote awareness of digital preservation issues through symposia and workshops at major film conferences; and
• the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction.

“America’s creativity is unrivaled in the world, and it is among our most important exports,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. “The library is pleased to be able to bring together creators of such diverse content for the sake of saving our nation’s heritage, which is increasingly being created only in digital formats.”

Preserving Creative America is an initiative of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, authorized by Congress in 2000 to preserve digital information to ensure its accessibility for future generations.

Posted on August 10, 2007.