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The Chronopolis Digital Preservation Demonstration Project, one of the Library of Congress' latest efforts to collect and preserve at-risk digital information, has been officially launched as a multi-member partnership to meet the archival needs of a wide range of cultural and social domains. Chronopolis is a digital preservation data grid framework being developed by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego , the UC San Diego Libraries (UCSDL) , and their partners at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado and the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) . A key goal of the Chronopolis project is to provide cross-domain collection sharing for long-term preservation. Using existing high-speed educational and research networks and mass-scale storage infrastructure investments, the partnership is designed to leverage the data storage capabilities at SDSC, NCAR, and UMIACS to provide a preservation data grid that emphasizes heterogeneous and highly redundant data storage systems.

Standard "on-demand" storage costs for UC researchers on the SDSC Cloud start at only $3.25 a month per 100GB (gigabytes) of storage. A "condo" option, which allows users to make cost-effective long term investment in hardware that becomes part of the SDSC Cloud, is also available. Full details can be found at https://cloud.sdsc.edu/hp/index.php.

While storage and technological issues have been at the forefront of the discussion on digital information, relatively little focus has been on the economic aspect of preserving vast amounts of digital data fundamental to the modern world.

Usually, I hear about this with socsci data, but the basic issue remains: obsolete and almost unresolvable data loss.