The APTrust Story

Abstract

The Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust) is an innovative consortium committed to the creation and management of a sustainable environment for digital preservation and aggregate repository services for academic and research content. This paper responds to a number of questions that were voiced when APTrust was established: What led to the formation of APTrust? What does APTrust hope to accomplish? Most important, why should it be a top priority for academic libraries? After considering these questions and more, founding partners of APTrust agreed that building a robust and sustainable solution for digital preservation is the greatest challenge facing research libraries and their parent institutions today. This is the story of a collaboration that intends to rise to that challenge.