Introduction: The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program

This special issue of Library Trends is comprised of sixteen articles that tell fascinating stories about the ground-breaking efforts of numerous partners within the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). Since its inception in 2004, NDIIPP has grown from an experimental program into a true partnership of concerned organizations working together to sustain access to digital information that is critical to scholarship and cultural heritage nationwide.¹ The seeds for NDIIPP were initially sown in a report issued in July 2000 by the National Research Council titled LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress. The report, which was commissioned by the Library and Congress in 1998, was an on-site study of the Library's technology practices, an initiative conducted by a committee of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council.

Among the recommendations of the LC21 report was the point that the Library of Congress should take the lead in the preservation and archiving of digital materials, but that it must continue to work with other institutions in determining collection policies for digital information, and it must accelerate its efforts to meet the growing demand. In December 2000 Congress passed legislation asking the Library of Congress to develop a national program to preserve the ever-growing amounts of digital information, especially materials created only in digital format. This law was passed in order to ensure that this content would be accessible for current and future generations. This program was funded by a $100 million congressional appropriation and was formally called the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). In December 2000 Congress released $5 million for the initial planning phase. From that point forward, the Library of Congress sought and solidified collaborations with numerous organizations, both public and private, to present a plan for a national digital preservation program to Congress in 2002. In this plan, Librarian of Congress James Billington emphasized the urgent need to set in place a trusted solution for the preservation of scholarly and cultural heritage information nationwide through the NDIIPP program mission:

Never has access to information that is authentic, reliable, and complete been more important, and never has the capacity of libraries and other heritage institutions to guarantee that access been in greater jeopardy. Recognizing the value that the preservation of past knowledge has played in the creativity and innovation of the nation, the U.S. Congress seeks, through the Library of Congress, to find solutions to the challenges posed by capturing and preserving digital information of cultural and social significance.

With these words and the funding from the United States Congress, the Library of Congress entered a new era that is marked by the necessity for cooperation and interdependence in order to sustain access to a highly distributed network of digital heritage and scholarship content. The sixteen manuscripts included in this special issue represent a microcosm of over sixty collaborative projects that were launched by the NDIIPP. They are organized around three important themes that emerged from the individual and the collective efforts of the partners. These themes coalesced around the shared critical need to preserve significant born-digital and digitized legacy information. The topics treated in this issue include, more specifically:

• • new organizations and missions and new perspectives on sustainability;

• • preservation of specific types of content, including Web content, cultural heritage and special collections, ejournals, and geospatial information, and the format and metadata standards to support ingest, management, and migration of digital content;

• • interoperability, data transfer and storage, and the future of digital preservation systems.

Each article in this issue tells a compelling story conveying the sense of urgency that has pervaded the efforts of the numerous institutions and groups involved in NDIIPP, many with little else in common but the need to develop policy, structure, process, commitments, and technologies to preserve significant cultural and historical content into the future.

In the decade that has passed since the LC21 report was commissioned by the Library and Congress, there has been a significant amount of forward momentum...