DIGARCH project highlights multi-institutional testbed for scalable digital archiving

Abstract

This project addresses two major issues of the NSF/Library of Congress DIGARCH program at the same time: digital preservation and inter-institutional collaboration. There is no shortage of at-risk digital media in the physical archives of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Many of the objects have extraordinary value, for both research and education. The cost to recover lost objects is high, at a rate of approximately $50K per day at sea.The Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have joined forces with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) to build a testbed for multi-institutional archiving of shipboard and deep submergence vehicle data. In addition to the more than 92,000 objects stored in the SIOExplorer Digital Library, the testbed will provide access to data, photographs, video images and documents from WHOI ships, Alvin submersible and Jason ROV dives, and deep-towed vehicle surveys. An interactive digital library interface allows combinations of distributed collections to be browsed, metadata inspected, and objects displayed or selected for download.