About the DuraCloud Pilot Program

The DuraCloud Pilot Program aims to test the new service and cloud based technology which is targeted at academic libraries, national and public libraries, universities, and other cultural heritage organizations that are responsible for digital preservation and ensuring perpetual access to digital content.

DuraSpace has been funded by the NDIIPP program sponsored by Library of Congress, to run a pilot program testing and deploying the DuraCloud technology and service around several use cases with pilot partners. The pilot program commenced in July 2009 and will be completed in Summer 2010. There are three partners participating in the pilot program: New York Public Library, Biodiversity Heritage Library, and WGBH. Each of the pilot partners has identified a particular use case for DuraCloud, and content for testing in the pilot. Data includes images, video, and text in a variety of formats. Upon completion of the pilot program the DuraSpace organization intends to release the open technology and launch the service.

DuraCloud is a hosted service and open technology which allows organizations and end users to effectively utilize public cloud services. The DuraCloud platform is currently built upon commercial cloud infrastructure. Current companies integrated with the DuraCloud hosted service as part of the pilot include Amazon, EMC (Atmos), and RackSpace cloud storage and cloud compute. Each user organization is assigned their own DuraCloud account, where they can manage their content. Content can be accessed and viewed through a single duracloud user interface which is controlled and managed by the DuraCloud account administrator. DuraCloud will allow users to replicate content to one or more storage cloud providers through a simple web interface. A set of preservation services will be available through DuraCloud which will include: replication, bit integrity checking, tagging and browsing. DuraCloud will also host a variety of access and data mining applications. A few services that are being tested in the pilot are video streaming, JPEG 2000 image serving, and file format transformation.

To find out more about the DuraCloud Pilot Program, please listen to this webinar.