Location: The National Library of Estonia, Tallinn, Estonia
Date: May 23-25, 2011

This page will be updated with registration information as it becomes available.

Co-sponsored by the U.S. Library of Congress, the National Library of Estonia, and the Educopia Institute, the “Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation” Conference will provide a forum in which national preservation programs may share information with each other in order to begin building strategic international collaborations to support the preservation of our collective cultural memory.

More than ninety percent of the world’s information is currently produced as digital files, not print documents. Given the vulnerability of digital content to such threats as power failures, cyber attacks, fires, floods, and hardware and software failures, we need to act now to provide long-term digital preservation services for our digital history, or we risk losing that history altogether. How do we appropriately curate these new digital resources—from government Web sites and institutional records to digital archives, and from scanned images to born-digital recordings? How might national digital preservation efforts be strengthened through international alliances?

A number of countries have embarked on ambitious digital preservation programs at the national level that provide focused support for digital preservation efforts. The “Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation” conference will enable such programs to share information with each other in order to build strategic international collaborations to support the preservation of our collective cultural memory. The conference goals are fourfold:

1. To share information between national digital preservation efforts around the world;
2. To align promising technical and organizational approaches, emphasizing interoperability;
3. To foster economically sustainable collaborations among institutions and countries;
4. To devise an action plan for building collaboration among interested national initiatives, with a view to forming an International Steering Committee for digital preservation.

The projected outcome for the event will be a strategic alignment of national approaches to enable new forms of international collaboration.

If you are interested in presenting or nominating someone to present on a national perspective, please contact
Katherine Skinner, and Michelle Gallinger.