MetaArchive Cooperative

The MetaArchive Cooperative was an international digital preservation network composed of libraries, archives, and other memory institutions. As of August 2011, the MetaArchive preservation network was composed of 24 secure servers (referred to as “caches”) in four countries with a collective capacity of over 300TB. Forty-eight institutions were actively preserving their digital collections in the network. MetaArchive formally sunset on March 31, 2025.

The MetaArchive Cooperative preserved a wide variety of data types and many genres of content, including electronic theses and dissertations, digital newspapers, archival content such as photograph collections and A/V materials, business/e-records, and datasets. The network was “dark,” meaning access was limited to the content owner/contributor. It was also format-agnostic, meaning that each content contributor could determine what formats it wished to preserve.