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Library of Congress and DuraSpace Launch Cloud Technologies Pilot Program

The Library of Congress (www.loc.gov) National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP; www.digitalpreservation.gov) and DuraSpace (www.duraspace.org) have announced that they will launch a 1-year pilot program to test the use of cloud technologies to enable perpetual access to digital content. The pilot will focus on a new service, DuraCloud, developed and hosted by the DuraSpace organization. Among the NDIIPP partners participating in the pilot program are The New York Public Library and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Cloud technologies use remote computers to provide local services through the internet. DuraCloud will let an institution provide data storage and access without having to maintain its own dedicated technical infrastructure.

For NDIIPP partners, it is not enough to preserve digital materials without also having strategies in place to make that content accessible. NDIIPP is concerned with many types of digital content, including geospatial, audiovisual, images, and text. The NDIIPP partners will focus on deploying access-oriented services that make it easier to share important cultural, historical, and scientific materials with the world. To ensure perpetual access, valuable digital materials must be stored in a durable manner. DuraCloud will provide both storage and access services, including content replication and monitoring services that span multiple cloud-storage providers.

The New York Public Library offers a set of scholarly research collections with an intellectual and cultural range that is both global and local. The DuraCloud pilot program at the library will replicate large collections of digital images from a Fedora repository into DuraCloud. The New York Public Library plans to convert the images from the TIFF format to JPEG 2000 and to serve these images using a powerful JPEG 2000 image engine within DuraCloud.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library provides access to historical journal literature in biodiversity in collaboration with global partners, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Missouri Botanical Gardens, and the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. Their DuraCloud pilot will focus on replication of digital content to provide protection for valuable biodiversity resources. The pilot will demonstrate bidirectional replication of content among partners in the U.S. and Europe. The library will use the cloud computing capabilities offered by DuraCloud to analyze biodiversity texts to extract key information such as species-related words. The institution will also deploy a JPEG 2000 image engine via DuraCloud to process and serve digital images.

Source: Library of Congress