nestor: Network of Expertise in Long-term STOrage of Digital Resources - A Digital Preservation Initiative for Germany

As in other countries, longterm preservation of digital resources has become an important issue in Germany in recent years. Nevertheless, coming to agreement with institutions throughout the country to cooperate on tasks for a long-term preservation effort has taken a great deal of effort. Although there had been considerable attention paid to the preservation of physical media like CD-ROMS, technologies available for the long-term preservation of digital publications like e-books, digital dissertations, websites, etc., are still lacking. Considering the importance of the task within the federal structure of Germany, with the responsibility of each federal state for its science and culture activities, it is obvious that the approach to a successful solution of these issues in Germany must be a cooperative approach. Since 2000, there have been discussions about strategies and techniques for long-term archiving of digital information, particularly within the distributed structure of Germany’s library and archival institutions (see [2] or [3]). A key part of all the previous activities was focusing on nestor: Network of Expertise in Longterm Storage of Digital Resources