Making Digital Preservation Policy: the National Perspective
Abby Smith and Paul Courant, consultants to the Library of Congress's national digital preservation program, will describe the Library's development of a national strategy to preserve at-risk digital content. Areas of particular focus are:
- the identification of content with long-term value;
- the allocation of roles and responsibilities among organizations with interest in long-term access to that content;
- the economics of archiving;
- and a range of public policy issues, such as intellectual property, that the Library is engaging.
Paul Courant is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Professor of Public Policy, Professor of Economics, and Faculty Associate in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. From 2002-2005 he served as Provost and Executive Vice-President for Academic Affairs. For more information, see his web page at Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy.
Abby Smith is a historian and consulting analyst interested in the creation, preservation, and use of the cultural record in a variety of media; the impact of digital information technologies on cultural heritage institutions; and the evolving role of information as a public good. She has worked at the Council on Library and Information Resources (Washington, DC) and at the Library of Congress. She currently works with the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in development of its national strategy to identify, collect, and preserve digital content of long-term value. (See "Distributed Preservation from a National Perspective: NDIIPP at Mid-Point," in D-LIB).