Since 2003, the Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA) has been creating an IMLS-grant-funded Digital Archive (DA) to serve Florida’s public universities. The DA project’s goals are to: "1) establish a working and trusted digital archive, 2) identify costs involved in all aspects of archiving, and 3) disseminate tools, procedures and results for the widest national impact."
The DA will "accept submission packages from participating partners, ingest digital documents along with the appropriate metadata, and safely store on-site and off-site copies of the files."
The DA is a "dark" archive:
Our original idea, and the one thing that did not change over time, was the idea of
building a dark archive. By “dark” I mean an archive with no real-time, online access to
the content by anyone except repository staff. Dark archives are out of favor right now
but we had some good reasons for it. We serve ten state universities and each of them
has its own presentation systems and some have their own institutional repository
systems. Some of the libraries use FCLA delivery applications but some use their own
applications. Central Florida uses CONTENTdm, South Florida uses SiteSearch and
Florida State uses DigiTool. At FCLA we donÂ’t have the software to replicate these
access functions and we donÂ’t have any desire to; it would cost a great deal to acquire the
software licenses, and it would take a huge amount of staff to support all these
applications. So the idea of our offering presentation services on top of our stored
repository content wasnÂ’t feasible.
Real-life digital preservation efforts are always worth keeping an eye on, and this one is quite ambitious. You can track their progress through their grant page and their publications and presentations page.
The project’s most recent presentation by Priscilla Caplan ("Preservation Rumination: Digital Preservation and the Unfamiliar Future ") is available from OCLC in both PowerPoint and MP3 formats.
