Recent years have seen a massive increase in the range and volume of digital information resources, and their acquisition by libraries without, as yet, any formal mechanism for the long-term preservation of this material. There is a pressing need for a strategy for digital preservation which addresses both the urgency of rapidly obsolete technologies, the current economic situation as well as the complex intellectual property rights issues which arise from work in this area. The CEDARS Project has been established to explore digital archiving in some depth.

The Project, which is funded by the UK higher education funding councils, began on the 1st April 1998 and will run for three years. The funding was awarded to the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) and the work is being carried out on behalf of CURL by three CURL institutions - the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Oxford.

CEDARS stands for 'CURL Exemplars in Digital ARchiveS' and its main objective is to address strategic, methodological and practical issues and provide guidance in best practice for digital preservation. It will do this by work on two levels - through demonstrator projects which will provide concrete practical experience in preserving digital resources, and through strategic working groups based on broad concepts or concerns which will articulate preferences and make recommendations of benefit to the wider community. The main deliverables of the project will be recommendations and guidelines as well as practical robust and scaleable models for establishing distributed digital archives.

It is expected that the outcomes of CEDARS will influence legislation for legal deposit of electronic materials and feed directly into the emerging national strategy for digital archives currently being developed through the UK's National Preservation Office.