may07c.indd


Jane Hedberg P r e s e r v a t i o n  N e w s  

Banks/Harris award 
Walter Henry has won the 2007 Paul Banks 
and Carolyn Harris Preservation Award. This 
award recognizes the superlative contribu­
tion of a preservation or conservation profes­
sional to libraries and archives. Henry has 
had a successful career at Stanford University, 
but his most well­known achievement is the 
creation and administration of Conservation 
OnLine (CoOL), the go­to place for preser­
vation information. In 1987, he began an 
electronic list, Conservation DistList, which 
he subsequently incorporated in his Web 
site, CoOL. Walter joins an illustrious group 
of former winners: Sally Buchanan, Ellen 
McCrady, John Dean, Jan Merrill­Oldham, 
Paul Conway, and Gary Frost. 

The URL for CoOL is palimpsest.stanford. 
edu/. 

digipres@ala.org 
The Preservation and Reformatting Section 
(PARS) of ALA’s Association for Library Col­
lections and Technical Services (ALCTS) has 
initiated digipres, an unmoderated electronic 
list devoted to digital preservation. In this 
forum, digital preservation is defi ned as 
the combined “policies, strategies and ac­
tions that ensure access to information in 
digital formats over time.” The electronic 
list is intended to serve cultural institutions, 
primarily libraries, and to foster discussion 
about management rather than strictly tech­
nical issues. 

To subscribe, go to lists.ala.org/wws/info 
/digipres and click on the subscribe button 
in the left­hand column. 

Trusted digital repositories 
The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and 
RLG Programs (a unit of OCLC Programs 
and Research Division) have published 

Jane Hedberg is preservation program offi  cer at Harvard 
University Library, e-mail: jane_hedberg@harvard.edu; 
fax: (617) 496-8344 

Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certifi ca­
tion: Criteria and Checklist (also known as 
TRAC). This 93­page report is the culmination 
of approximately four year’s work to develop 
a method for evaluating digital repositories. 
In 2003, the RLG­NARA Task Force on Digital 
Repository Certification produced a set of 
certification criteria in checklist form. In 2005, 
CRL conducted a Mellon­funded project to 
establish documentation requirements, de­
lineate a process for certification, and create 
methodologies for evaluating a repository’s 
current and future health. The audit method­
ology from these two projects was tested on 
several repositories, including E­Depot at the 
Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands; the 
Inter­University Consortium for Political and 
Social Research at the University of Michigan; 
and Portico, an archive of scholarly e­journals. 
In addition, the Digital Curation Center in the 
United Kingdom, DigitalPreservationEurope in 
continental Europe, and NESTOR in Germany 
tested the checklist. Further work on this 
digital repository audit and certifi cation will 
continue exclusively through CRL. 

The report is available as a free PDF docu­
ment at bibpurl.oclc.org/web/16712. 

LIFE project 
The University College London (UCL) Library 
Services and the British Library (BL) have 
issued a research report on the LIFE Project. 
This year­long investigation examined the 
life cycles of digital collections, and the 
costs associated with each cycle, to develop 
a methodology for estimating digital preser­
vation costs. This methodology was tested 
on three different types of collections: UCL 
e­journals, BL Web Archiving, and BL Vol­
untary Deposit of Electronic Publications. 
This cost information (in GBP) can be used 
to direct development of new technologies 
and improved workflows that could lead to 
future savings. 

The report is available at www.ucl.ac.uk 
/ls/lifeproject/. 

318C&RL News May 2007

http:www.ucl.ac.uk
mailto:jane_hedberg@harvard.edu
mailto:digipres@ala.org