Federated Digital Preservation Across Space and Time

Our world has a critical need to organize, preserve, and make accessible the digital holdings that represent society's intellectual capital. This intellectual capital contains the core seeds of knowledge that are the basis for current research, future scientific advances, and education source materials for use by the public, educators and researchers now and for the foreseeable future.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center and the UCSD Libraries with their partners NCAR and UMIACS have created Chronopolis to address these issues. Chronopolis is a national center for the management, long-term preservation, and promulgation of national digital assets.

A report issued 2002 by the NSF and the Library of Congress states:

"Solutions are urgently needed to prevent further loss of valuable digital information. These problems are urgent... action is needed now, not some time in the future..."

Chronopolis addresses this critical problem by providing a comprehensive model for the cyberinfrastructure of collection management, in which preserved intellectual capital is easily accessible, and research results, education material, and new knowledge can be incorporated smoothly over the long term. Integrating digital library, data grid, and persistent archive technologies, Chronopolis has created trusted preservation environments that span academic institutions and research projects, with the goal of long-term collection management, preservation, and knowledge generation.