ANADP II: Overview

Summary

The first ANADP conference, held in 2011 with participation by representatives from more than twenty countries, produced a broad agenda of forty-seven action areas for collaboration between national and international scale digital preservation efforts (this agenda, published in the ANADP volume, is available as a free download here).  Building on this agenda for action, the second ANADP conference will again bring together a variety of stakeholders involved in large-scale digital preservation efforts to take the next steps toward aligning our practices across national and international boundaries in targeted topical areas (e.g. education, standards, technical alignment).  This conference will bring together those interested in forging new internationally aligned efforts between communities that have shared digital preservation interests and yet rarely have an opportunity to come together—national libraries, academic libraries, public libraries, archives, and corporations.  This will be a highly participatory event in which stakeholders will work on specific action outcomes.  

The Conference

More than ninety percent of the world’s information is currently produced as digital files, not print documents. Increasingly, analog artifacts are being preserved through digitization efforts.  Given the vulnerability of digital content to such threats as power failures, cyber attacks, fires, and floods, as well as basic system and organizational failures, we need to act now to begin providing long-term digital preservation services for our digital history, or risk losing that history altogether. 

 

How do we care for these new digital resources—from government Web sites and institutional records to digital archives of culture, and from scanned images to born-digital recordings?  The first Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation (ANADP) conference, held May 23-25, 2011 in the capital of Estonia, provided a forum for national scale preservation programs to share information with each other and identify an agenda for building strategic international collaborations to support the preservation of our collective cultural memory.  The conference was jointly sponsored by the U.S. Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), the Educopia Institute, the National Library of Estonia, and more than two dozen other organizations engaged with digital preservation efforts.  

 

The first conference had a strong practical orientation, and produced a comprehensive monograph that examines alignment of national approaches to digital preservation in six dimensions: Organizational, Legal, Technical, Economic, Standards, and Educational Aspects.  The conference participants further identified an agenda for international cooperation that included forty-seven specific opportunities for collaboration.  The conference also identified the need to form an international steering committee for aligning national scale approaches to digital preservation.  The ANADP conference monograph is available as a free download at the URL http://www.educopia.org/publications and also can be obtained as a printed volume at cost.

 

The purpose of the second ANADP conference is to take up the agenda set forth in the first event and take specific actions to advance international collaboration in digital preservation.