The Chesapeake Project: A Collaborative Model for Preserving and Providing Permanent Access to Born Digital Web Publications

The proliferation of legal materials published directly to the Web with no print counterpart poses a new and unprecedented challenge for librarians, archivists, and information professionals concerned about the long-term preservation of legal resources. In response to this preservation challenge, the Georgetown Law Library, in collaboration with the State Law Libraries of Maryland and Virginia, launched The Chesapeake Project in March 2007. A two-year pilot digital preservation program, The Chesapeake Project utilizes a shared digital archive in order to stabilize, preserve, and provide permanent access to legal materials published on the World Wide Web. The intention of the project is to lay the foundation for a national movement among state and university law libraries to prevent the widespread loss of legal information in digital formats. The pilot aims to establish the beginnings of a strong regional digital archive collection of legal materials as well as a sound set of standards, policies, and practices to potentially guide the future realization of a collaborative, nationwide legal-information preservation program. The project initially used the OCLC Digital Archive. In early 2008, the CONTENTdm system was added to provide enhanced access and management for The Chesapeake Project collections. The Digital Preservation Librarian at the Georgetown Law Library presented a poster session reporting on pilot project’s progress to date