An Aid to Analyzing the Sustainability of Commonly Used Geospatial Formats: The Library of Congress Sustainability Website

Abstract

One of the important tasks associated with preserving the millions of nationally important digital information resources that are in danger of being lost or corrupted is deciding in which format a digital resource should be kept. Concerned about helping data stewards make informed decisions about the formats of the data in their curated collections, the Library of Congress (LOC) created a Format Sustainability Website. The LOC Format Sustainability website is supported by the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). Since 2004, the LOC Format Sustainability website has provided carefully researched information about digital data formats for data stewards concerned about the long-term preservation of their data. Since geographic resources are among those in danger of loss and corruption, descriptions of geospatial formats have been recently added and represent a new segment of the Format Sustainability Website at the Library of Congress in furtherance of the NDIIPP mission. The LOC Sustainability Website can be of great help to the data librarian, data archivist, and data manager who is concerned about the long term preservability of the formats they receive from data creators for keeping. This article describes the LOC Sustainability Website and how it can facilitate the work of data stewards who need to understand how to analyze and to describe the sustainability of geospatial formats that they receive and preserve.