The October DLF Steering Committee meeting included a presentation from Laura Campbell (LC) and Clay Shirky (consultant) about NDIIPP. There was considerable focus on the technical architecture being developed. They were not able to talk about the current solicitation (they can only answer questions submitted in writing). Final decisions about successful proposals under the current solicitation will be January 13-15 2004.
The technical architecture (can’t see anything very visible on the web) is a conceptual framework which defines some high level repository functions and interfaces for repository federation. There was quite a bit of emphasis on the export and import of complete collections, as this was seen as a common preservation activity. I find these types of frameworks useful, although of course they are not meant to answer actual implementation questions.
This architecture will be used to shape the interactions between the Preservation Network Partnership developed by the successful parties in the current solication. They are working with NSF who will release a call for proposals for supporting research over the next few months. There will be further NDIIPP solications for work on tools and guidelines, and on business models. There is likely to be workshops in these areas followed by some targeted investment.
The Library of Congress is a part of the International Internet Consortium and is working with other national libraries. One of the first outputs of this is likely to be a technical specification for an open source crawler .. which harvests websites.
