Nan Hyland
GIS Librarian
Main Library
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York

Creating a Digital Preservation Policy: Lessons Learned at CUGIR

In 1998, Cornell University’s Mann Library created CUGIR (Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository - http://cugir.mannlib.cornell.edu), a Web-based repository providing searching, browsing and download access to geospatial data and metadata for New York State. As more data are collected and updated, we are faced with the challenge of storing and archiving these data. Media degradation, hardware obsolescence, software dependence, and data migration have resulted in the loss of other large and important digital data sets. Careful planning is needed in order to ensure that GIS data sets are accessible and usable for as long as they are needed. We need to preserve data as well as the software and hardware environments in which the data may be accessed. In the summer of 2001 staff at CUGIR created a preservation policy to address the issues of providing archival access to older data in the future. This session will focus on the organizational and technical issues that need to be addressed within the GIS community to preserve important data.