The Chronopolis Digital Preservation Demonstration Project, one of the Library of Congress’ newest efforts to collect and preserve at-risk digital information, was officially launched in early February as a multi-member partnership to meet the archival needs of a wide range of cultural and social domains.

Chronopolis is a digital preservation datagrid framework being developed by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the University of California San Diego Libraries (UCSDL) and their partners at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado, and the University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

The Chronopolis Digital Preservation Demonstration Project leverages the data storage infrastructure at SDSC, NCAR, and UMIACS to provide a preservation datagrid that emphasizes heterogeneous, highly available and highly redundant data storage systems. Each Chronopolis partner will run a grid node containing at least 50 TB storage capacity for NDIIPP-related digital collections.

Two collections from within the NDIIPP community will be incorporated into the Chronopolis preservation grid. The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICSPR), based at the University of Michigan, will provide up to 12 TB of data from its world-renowned archive of social science and political research data sets, marking the first time that the collection is completely stored outside the state of Michigan. The California Digital Library (CDL) will provide up to 25 TB of content from the CDL Web-at-Risk collections which were first selected under the auspices of the original NDIIPP preservation partnerships to preserve political campaign websites in 2004.

For a brief overview of this project please watch our slidecast overview.