My good friend and colleague Todd Sussman and I have been working with the Arizona State Library who are leading an effort on behalf of the Library of Congress to design, develop and deploy an automated, integrated workflow to process collections of digital publications and records for the Library of Congress. Actually, Todd has been working on this great project for a while now and has only recently let me join in on the fun :-)Small.jpg)
The project is called Persistent Digital Archives and Library System (PeDALS), and the goal of the PeDALS project is to both revolutionize and standardize the manner in which official document records are digitally archived.
At its core, PeDALS aims to become both a long-term service to the national archive community and to local and national citizens alike.
For archivists, the vision is to support the ability to ingest "digital stacks" of digital copies of documents and corresponding metadata from various offices of origin, parse and catalog the documents and metadata, store a “local” copy of the documents and metadata, and then replicate the archived document across 7+ nationally distributed repository clusters. We are leveraging BizTalk Server as the metadata splitter and archive broker for archiving the digital records to a highly replicated storage network that can preserve the authenticity and integrity of the collections indefinitely.
Once the first phase (replicated dark storage) is complete, patrons like you and I can go to a public website and search on historical records like marriage certificates, official government documents, and even emails sent from government officials!
Today, there are 5 participating states in the project, including Arizona, Florida, South Carolina, New York, and Wisconsin.
Even more impressive, Microsoft Connected Systems technologies like BizTalk and .NET along with LINUX and BSD systems are driving national standardization of how the entire nation can work with a variety of repositories in a standards-compliant, interoperable manner to support the ongoing development of the system and promote best practices across national archive repositories.
You can see an overview of the project here: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/states_az/states_az.html as well as a system architecture diagram here: http://rpm.lib.az.us/pedals/Pilot_Architecture.asp.
All of this work is public record and I personally feel very proud to be working on this project as it will provide a great service to our local and national communities that will impact my children and several generations to come.