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The ECHO DEPository is a 5-year (2004-2009) digital preservation research and development project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, funded by the Library of Congress under their National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). 

Under NDIIPP, the ECHO DEPository has two phases:

Phase I (2004-2007)

Areas of ActivityPartners
  • Web archiving tool development
  • Repository evaluation
  • Interoperability tool development
  • Longer term semantic preservation research
Key partner: Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)

Other partners included:
  • National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
  • the public broadcasting stations, WILL TV and WILL Radio
  • Tufts University
  • Michigan State University
  • the state libraries of Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina, and Wisconsin


Phase II (2008-2009)

The ECHO DEPository received an 18-month extension from the Library of Congress for technical architecture work. Current project partners are OCLC, NCSA, and the University of Maryland.

Areas of ActivityPartners
  • Expansion of repository architecture towards promoting further interoperability
  • Semantic archiving for preservation of meaning as well as structure
  • Development of tools for automating metadata extraction and creation, as well as user evaluation
  • Data format risk assessment and analysis based on the INFORM methodology
  • OCLC
  • NCSA
  • UIUC Department of Computer Science
  • University of Maryland (University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Studies [UMIACS])
 
For more details on what NDIIPP is about, see background information on NDIIPP, provided by the Library of Congress, which also points to planning documents and to updates on its various initiatives and partnerships.

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.

If you have any questions, please contact Patricia Hswe, Project Manager, by email at phswe[at]illinois[dot]edu, or by phone at 217-244-4151.