Chronicles in preservation: preserving digital news and newspapers

Since the mid-1990s, libraries and archives have been digitizing newspapers for preservation and access. The standards used for this work have evolved significantly during this time. Modern collections employ digitization techniques, metadata extraction and standards, and file formats that are very different compared to early collections. Increasingly, libraries and archives also include born-digital material. Whether collected as transfers of production masters directly from newspaper publishers or harvested from their websites, this material also differs greatly in its composition, metadata, and other collection characteristics. Given the importance of newspapers as primary documents of history, libraries and archives must preserve their digitized and born-digital collections carefully. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has funded the Chronicles in Preservation project to study the preservation readiness of digital newspaper collections. Led by the Educopia Institute (www.educopia.org), the project has brought together seven American academic libraries and three distributed digital preservation (DDP) systems—MetaArchive, Chronopolis, and University of North Texas's Coda repository. Together, these partners are accomplishing a range of activities. First, they investigated community standards, specifications, and practices for digital newspaper collections and distilled this information into a set of Guidelines for Digital Newspaper Preservation Readiness. The Guidelines are now available for public review (publishing.educopia.org/chronicles). Second, they staged test content exchanges, exporting collections from the libraries, and ingesting them into the DDP systems. The DDP systems are documenting this experience in a Comparative Analysis of Distributed Digital Preservation Frameworks. Finally, the project is augmenting a set of existing digital preservation tools to simplify the packaging and exchange of digital newspaper collections. This paper provides a walkthrough of the structure and contents of the Guidelines for Preservation Readiness of Digital Newspapers, shares the evaluative metrics for the Comparative Analysis of Distributed Digital Preservation Frameworks, and discusses the implementations of the interoperability tools.