Vint Cerf has warned of a digital dark age where “our life, our memories, increasingly exist as bits of information…that risk being lost in the wake of an accelerating digital revolution.” Research libraries have been collaborating to develop infrastructure to help digital content persist over the long term. With support from SFU and Stanford, and in partnership with Educloud and campus data centres at the Universities of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Regina, and Manitoba, a consortium of university libraries in Western Canada has created WestVault, a digital preservation storage network characterized by multiple, geographically-distributed, disaster-diversified copies. This session will outline the technical, organizational, and sustainability challenges of digital preservation writ large, describe how preservation storage services like WestVault complement traditional IT storage infrastructure, and how regional preservation storage efforts might scale up nationally through partnerships.

Speaker

Corey Davis

Preservation Coordinator, University of Victoria