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Feature Articles

The Chesapeake Project: Preserving the Digital Future

By Anne Cassidy

The New York Police Department report “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat” made a splash when it came out in August 2007. Discussed on blogs and in the New York Times and other publications, the report examined terrorism cases in New York City and elsewhere in an attempt to understand what drives “unremarkable” people to become terrorists. Like so much born-digital information, however, the report is no longer available on its original URL — and if you find it elsewhere, its authenticity may be compromised. But thanks to the Chesapeake Project, a digital preservation effort spearheaded by the Georgetown Law Library in conjunction with the state law libraries of Maryland and Virginia, you can access the original report and thousands more like it.

The digital universe is growing at a mind-boggling rate. If you were to print out its estimated 500 billion gigabytes of information into books, the volumes would stretch to Pluto and back 10 times. Preserving and storing digital information has become a major challenge for companies, governments and universities around the world.

Sometimes it seems like a losing battle. A study in the Journal of Information Science found that three-quarters of the more than 700 Web site URLs it followed between 1997 and 2004 disappeared from their original locations during that time. Web sites vanish during routine maintenance, because of a change in management or administration or when Web masters update URLs. In some cases, this may be only a minor annoyance, but when Web-born information is cited in legal journal articles or used in court cases, it’s especially important to guarantee longevity.

“The average lifespan of a Web site is 44 to 75 days,” says Georgetown Law’s digital preservation librarian Sarah Rhodes, who manages the Chesapeake Project. But a funny — and telling — thing happened when she tried to source that fact. “I first saw this statistic on the Library of Congress’s digital preservation page. And then I saw it again on an Internet Archive page,” Rhodes says. “I looked and looked for the source of this statistic and found that it was a study that was only published online. The original version is no longer available.”

It’s to avoid such occurrences that the Chesapeake Project was born. While it’s by no means the only such project of its type, it’s certainly one of the most comprehensive. More than 4,300 digital items were harvested from the Web and preserved in the project’s archive during its first two years. “I wouldn’t say we’re ahead of others [in harvesting digital information], but we’re definitely in the forefront,” says Janice Anderson, Georgetown Law’s associate librarian for collection services.

Anderson has been involved in the Chesapeake Project from the beginning. In 2003, the Law Library, under the directorship of the late Bob Oakley, gathered publishers, library directors, archivists and others for a conference called “Preserving Legal Information for the 21st Century: Toward a National Agenda.”

“We were concerned that enough wasn’t being done by law libraries to preserve digital legal information,” says Anderson, who was at the meeting. From this gathering grew the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, dedicated to providing the organizational framework and professional commitment to bring about a “national consistency” in the preservation of print and electronic legal information. “Nothing less than transmission of the permanent, accurate record of legal knowledge to future generations is at stake,” reads LIPA’s mission statement.

While the Chesapeake Project began under the auspices of LIPA, it was Georgetown Law that spurred it on, recruiting Maryland and Virginia to join the effort — because partnership is crucial to meeting such lofty preservation goals — and hiring Rhodes, who has devoted much of her time to the project for its first two years. The name “Chesapeake” comes from the D.C., Maryland and Virginia partnership.

How Harvesting Happens

It is no small irony that in seeking to name various technological tasks we adapt the language of the past, even the long-ago past of our agrarian ancestors. The highly skilled librarians who select and safeguard Web content, therefore, are said to “harvest” it. But before they harvest, they must comb the Web to learn what is endangered. They do so by keeping abreast of news and legislative services and by monitoring the availability of state documents. They may subscribe to a resource such as WatchThatPage.com, which notifies users whenever pre-selected Web pages are changed. Often in looking for one document librarians find another, and another and another. In some cases — increasingly more often these days — they hear directly from a publisher that a report’s hard copy days are over. And this, given the short life span of Web sites, puts the publication on a de-facto warning list.

“I may get an e-mail saying, ‘We’re not printing this anymore — we’re publishing it on the Web,” says Mary Jo Lazun of the Maryland State Law Library. “If we don’t harvest the Web version [of that document] soon we know that within six months or a year or two it’s going to disappear or move.”

Due to the unique nature of legal documents, 95 percent of the material harvested is in PDF format. But the type of document depends in part upon the entity doing the harvesting. The Virginia State Library primarily harvests circuit court reports and annual state-of-the-judiciary reports. Katherine Baer of the Maryland State Law Library says she preserves Web-born documents produced by various agencies, task forces and governor’s commissions — most anything produced by state entities. “We go pretty broad, anything that may be related to the law, but we also get annual reports for state agencies, various statistical reports, that sort of thing.”

The Georgetown Law Library leads in the harvesting effort. “We’re pulling documents from all over the place — the American Bar Association, the Urban Institute, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Conference of Mayors,” Rhodes said during an interview, as she perused the Web site of the project’s digital repository (www.legalinfoarchive.org) from her office in Georgetown Law’s Williams Library. Of special interest are journalism, copyright law, public health law, environmental law and policy, conflict resolution and problem solving, human rights and the Supreme Court — all areas of Law Center expertise.

Librarians must certify that the material they’re harvesting is authentic, which the Law Library does via a periodic review of files. One way to do this is with a program that adds up all the 1s and 0s that make up a digital file, creating a number called a checksum. “If there’s a change in that number [from one measurement to the next] then that file is considered corrupt,” Rhodes says. The librarian also creates descriptive metadata for each file — including what format to use to retrieve the document, which law library harvested it, whether there are any permission or copyright restrictions and other information.

Fully Searchable

When the Chesapeake Project began, no one could have imagined the hurdles it would face — beginning with Oakley’s death, at the age of 61, in September 2007. “Bob was in a lot of ways the vision behind the whole project, and losing his leadership was really something. But we’ve worked together well since then,” Rhodes says.

When the project began, Rhodes and others had to decide how the preservation piece would be handled. Rather than using their own homemade digital repository with opensource software, they decided to use the Online Computer Library Center, the nonprofit computer library service and research organization that also produces WorldCat, the worldwide library catalog.

“One year into the project we were notified by OCLC that they were migrating our materials to a new, more sophisticated archive,” Rhodes explains. So only months after learning one system of cataloging and coding, Rhodes had to learn another, the Contentdm digital collection management software. But this was fortuitous, she says. Whereas with the previous system, users tapped directly into the archived copy of a file, the new system provides users with an access copy, while the original remains safely archived. “It’s a two-tiered system,” Rhodes explains, “with a dark archive on the back end, which the user cannot access, and a content management system on the front end.”

Another advantage to this system is that it’s fully searchable by Google and other search engines, as well as via library catalogs, which is the only way it was available before. This made user figures soar so high (from 6,612 hits to 177,152) that at first Rhodes thought there was some mistake. But there wasn’t. Rhodes knew then that there was a tremendous audience for the material she was preserving.