The Guidelines for Digital Newspaper Preservation Readiness address a specific set of preservation challenges faced by libraries, archives, historical societies, and other organizations that curate substantial collections of digital newspaper content. The Guidelines are intended to inform curators and collection managers at libraries, archives, historical societies, and other such memory organizations about various practical readiness activities that they can take. They provide links to technical resources that curators can either implement themselves or work with their technical staff to implement. The Guidelines (Version 1.0) only deal with digital newspapers at this point, not broadcast or other forms of digital news.

In 2011, a research team led by the University of North Texas, the Educopia Institute/MetaArchive Cooperative, and the worldwide Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), began studying the production, dissemination, and preservation of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). The original intent was to develop and disseminate documentation for academic libraries that would help curators better understand and address the preservation challenges presented by these new digital collections. As researchers from the libraries of University of North Texas, Virginia Tech, Rice University, Boston College, Indiana State University, Penn State, and the University of Arizona began to grapple with ETD lifecycle management issues, they quickly realized that librarians were but one of many academic stakeholder groups that work collaboratively to produce and maintain ETD collections. Studying the library role in isolation was neither feasible nor helpful. The scope of our work increased to encompass the roles and responsibilities of core stakeholders in the ETD lifecycle: students, faculty, administrators, technologists, commercial vendors, and librarians. The resulting Guidance Documents address areas of interest to ETD program planners, managers, and curators. They will help this extended set of stakeholders understand, document, and address the administrative, legal, and technical challenges presented by ETDs—from submission …