The ECHO DEPository is a 3-year (2004-2007) digital preservation research
and development project at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign in partnership with OCLC and funded by the Library of
Congress under their National Digital Information Infrastructure
Preservation Program (NDIIPP). Other project partners include NCSA, WILL TV and Radio,
Tufts University, Michigan State University, and state libraries from
Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.
What is the digital preservation problem?
The Library of Congress sums up the problem this way:
Information is being produced in greater quantities and
with greater frequency than at any time in history. Electronic media,
especially the Internet, make it possible for almost anyone to become a
"publisher." How will society preserve this information and make it
available to future generations? How will libraries and other
repositories classify this information so that their patrons can find
it with the same ease that they can locate a book on a shelf?
The ease with which electronic information can be created and
"published" makes much of what is available today, gone tomorrow. Thus
there is an urgent need to preserve this information before it is
forever lost.
The ECHO DEPository project pulls together several streams of
activities aimed at helping to answer the question of how digital
resources will be identified, archived and preserved for the future.
These activities include the development of new tools for selecting and
capturing materials published on the Web, the evaluation of existing
tools for storing and accessing digital objects, and research into the
challenges of maintaining archived digital resources into the future.
This Web site provides additional information about these
activities and about the project partners, and, as the project moves
ahead, will be used to share our findings.
If you have any questions, please contact Janet Eke, Project Coordinator via email at
or phone 217-333-4701.
