The Chesapeake Project has released its Two-Year Pilot Project Evaluation.
Here's an excerpt:
The Chesapeake Project began as a collaborative, two-year pilot program with the goal of preserving born-digital legal information published directly to the Web. It was implemented in early 2007 by the Georgetown Law Library and the State Law Libraries of Maryland and Virginia. Having successfully completed its pilot phase, The Chesapeake Project' legal information archive is now expanding.
The following document comprises the final evaluation and account of The Chesapeake Project's accomplishments during its two-year pilot phase, spanning from February 27, 2007, to February 28, 2009.
During this time, the project's digital archive was populated with more than 4,300 digital items representing nearly 1,900 Web-published titles, the vast majority of which have no print counterpart. Each of these titles were harvested from the Web, stored within a secure digital archive and assigned permanent archive URLs. Today, each archived digital title remains accessible to users, despite whether or not the original digital files have been altered or removed from their original locations on the Web.
A 2008 analysis of the digital archive's content showed that more than eight percent of the titles archived by The Chesapeake Project had disappeared from their original URLs within the project's first year, but remained accessible thanks to the project's efforts. The current evaluation demonstrates that this figure has increased significantly over the past year. In fact, as of March 2009, nearly 14 percent of the project's archived titles—approximately one in seven—have disappeared from their original locations on the Web.
