Background

In August 2011, University of Virginia Dean of Libraries, Karin Wittenborg, and James Hilton, then Chief Information Officer, convened a meeting of colleagues from six universities (Duke University, Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University) to discuss the challenges of preserving the growing amount of digital content. The group discussed the possibility of aligning each institution’s preservation efforts to:

• preserve the scholarly record in ways that would allow the digital copy to be the copy of record
• provide sustained funding for digital preservation of the scholarly record
• accomplish more together

Coalescing around the need to preserve academic content and believing a community approach would be more productive, they created a consortium, Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust), that was committed to creating and managing an aggregated preservation repository.
The group invited five additional like-minded institutions to become founding members of the consortium: Columbia University, University of Michigan, University of Notre Dame, Stanford University, and Syracuse University.
Each of the founding members recognized the value of leveraging joint resources and defining common goals. With these principles, the Academic Preservation Trust was born.