From an Internet Archive Blog Post:
Research and cultural heritage institutions are facing increasing costs to provide long-term public access to historically valuable collections of scientific data, born-digital records, and other digital artifacts. With many institutions moving data to cloud services, data sharing and access costs have become more complex. As leading institutions in decentralization and data preservation, the Internet Archive (IA), Code for Science & Society (CSS) and California Digital Library (CDL) will work together on a proof-of-concept pilot project to demonstrate how decentralized technology could bolster existing institutional infrastructure and provide new tools for efficient data management and preservation.
Using the Dat Protocol (developed by CSS), this project aims to test the feasibility f a decentralized network as a new option for organizations to archive and monitor their digital assets.
Dat is already being used by diverse communities, including researchers, developers, and data managers. California Digital Library is building innovative tools for data publication and digital preservation. The Internet Archive is leading efforts to advance the decentralized web community.
This joint project will explore the issues that emerge from collecting institutions adopting decentralized technology for storage and preservation activities. The pilot will feature a defined corpus of open data from CDL’s data sharing service.
The project aims to demonstrate how members of a cooperative, decentralized network can leverage shared services to ensure data preservation while reducing storage costs and increasing replication counts. By working with the Dat Protocol, the pilot will maximize openness, interoperability, and community input. Linking institutions via cooperative, distributed data sharing networks has the potential to achieve efficiencies of scale not possible through centralized or commercial services. The partners intend to openly share the outcomes of this proof-of-concept work to inform further community efforts to build on this potential.
Learn More, Read the Complete Blog Post
See Also: Learn More About the DAT Protocol
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