"What does it really mean to preserve an electronic record for 50 years?" This is the question that Adam Jansen, Washington state's digital archivist asks regularly. "We have a long standing core set of archival science principles that addresses questions like why you have an archive and how you create one. Our challenge is applying those principles to this new media."

There is recognition within the digital preservation community that to move forward, changes must be made -- not just to the way librarians, archivists and records managers address preservation issues, but by extending the preservation community to others involved in the creation, management and use of digital information.

The responsibility for preserving and providing public access to state and local government information belongs to state libraries and archives. As interest in digital form increases, state librarians, archivists and records managers are finding that new strategies are required to meet this responsibility.

Traditional partnerships in the digital preservation community are necessary but not sufficient, according to Jan Reagan, head of the State Library of North Carolina's Document Branch. Reagan was actively involved in pioneering a statewide collaboration between the North Carolina State Library, State Archives, and State Data Center to research digital information issues, gain a better understanding of current publishing practices in state agencies and develop solutions for managing state information in digital formats.

The preservation business has changed and new partnerships are seen as critical to creating the necessary capability for success. "When we received reports in paper form -- it didn't matter to those of us who were curators how the information had been created, because the medium was the printed page," Reagan said. "Our concern was cataloging it, preserving it and making it accessible. In the digital age, information is coming at us in many formats, and the process of creation now very much influences the process of preservation. We need to think differently about how the processes of creation, management and use influence the process of preservation."

Reagan and her colleagues in the digital preservation community are calling for new partnerships as a way to connect digital preservation experts with decisions about these processes of creation, management and use -- such as system investments and standards setting -- because how that happens determines the options available in the preservation process. This new interdependency is not generally understood and is less accounted for in organizational decision-making and planning.

"A critical role for these partnerships is to help creators and managers of digital information realize the consequences of today's decisions on tomorrow's access and use," Reagan said. What the curator must know has changed -- with traditional media it's important to know what information is being created; with digital media, curators must also know how it was created.


Partnering With CIOs
To deal with this landscaping change, the Library of Congress created the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), through which the Library brings together working groups to focus on digital preservation issues facing specific sectors including media, entertainment and state government.

The state government's effort was launched in spring 2005 with a series of national workshops that brought together three-person teams from the 50 states and several territories in one-day sessions to identify and discuss issues concerning digital preservation professionals. High priority content types, as well as those content types considered most at-risk, were identified and discussed. Roles for various members of the digital preservation community, such as states, associations, funding organizations and the Library of Congress, were considered.

One of the workshops' key conclusions was the need to invest in extending the digital preservation community's boundaries to include state CIOs and state information technology communities -- essentially to build enterprise digital preservation partnerships. The workshops series report can be found