A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation (Educopia Institute:2010)
(pdf edition) (order a printed edition)

Authored by members of the MetaArchive Cooperative, A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation is the first of a series of volumes describing successful collaborative strategies and articulating specific new models that may help cultural memory organizations work together for their mutual benefit. This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways. This guide is written with a broad audience in mind that includes librarians, archivists, scholars, curators, technologists, lawyers, and administrators. Readers may use this guide to gain both a philosophical and practical understanding of the emerging field of distributed digital preservation, including how to establish or join a network.

Strategies for Sustaining Digital Libraries (Emory University Libraries: 2008)
(pdf edition) (order a printed edition)

This collection of essays on sustaining digital libraries is a report of early findings from pioneers who have worked to establish digital libraries, not merely as experimental projects, but as ongoing services and collections that are intended to be sustained over time in ways consistent with the long-held practices of print-based libraries. Particularly during this period of extreme technological transition, it is imperative that programs across the nation - and indeed the world - actively share their innovations, experiences, and techniques in order to begin cultivating new standard practices. The collective sentiment of the field is that we must begin to transition from a punctuated, project-based mode of advancing innovative information services to an ongoing programmatic mode of sustaining digital libraries for the long haul. Edited by Katherine Skinner and Martin Halbert; features essays by Paul Arthur Berkman (UC Santa Barbara), Michael Furlough (Penn State), and Leslie Johnson (IMLS).

Free Culture and the Digital Library, Symposium Proceedings 2005
(pdf edition)

These proceedings are an unusual blend of contributions inspired by a group of shared beliefs about freedom of information and digital libraries. The core convictions that inspired this symposium and this book are 1) that the public has a right to freely access, preserve, and use shared cultural information; 2) that digital libraries (broadly construed) are key to providing for this right in the modern world; 3) that there are unfortunate trends afoot to constrain and deny this right; and finally 4) that we must mobilize efforts now to resist these trends and preserve this essential right. Edited by Martin Halbert; features essays by Siva Vaidhyanathan (New York University), Simeon Warner (Cornell University), and Denise Troll Covey (Carnegie Mellon University).