The National Geospatial Digital Archive: A Collaborative Project to Archive Geospatial Data

The National Geospatial Digital Archive is a collaborative project between the University of California at Santa Barbara and Stanford University. The project was funded by the Library of Congress through their National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The goal of the collaboration was to collect, preserve, and provide long-term access to at-risk geospatial data. The project partners created preservation environments at both universities, created and populated a format registry, collected more than ten terabytes of geospatial data and imagery, wrote collection development policies governing acquisitions, and created legal documents designed to manage the content and the relationship between the two nodes.