The preservation of digital geospatial data content is a growing concern. Geospatial data are public records, many of which need to be preserved for their legal, fiscal, analytical and historic value. Critical information captured in geospatial datasets include aerial imagery, land records, transportation, regulatory data, demographics, marine and natural resources.
The GICC has been involved in this effort through its vision for NC OneMap, which states that “historical and temporal data will be maintained and available.” Work is progressing on several fronts to build local and state government awareness about the need to archive and preserve data assets for the long term, and to provide the tools to assist in that effort.
The Long Haul
The
Archival and Long Term Access ad hoc Committee framed the issue in 2007 for North Carolina and considered numerous aspects of this community-wide problem. They suggested guidelines and made three recommendations involving records retention related to geospatial public information.
Two Library of Congress grants have furthered North Carolina’s efforts to tackle this important work. The current “GeoMapp” project (2008–2011) and the “North Carolina Geospatial Data Archiving Project” (2004-2009) have been funded as part of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. The projects considered aspects of digital geospatial archiving such as content standards, digital rights, repositories and ingest workflows on a local and state level, as well as records retention schedules. Because government digital geospatial records are valuable public documents, their archival preservation should become part of agency business processes.
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