PHILADELPHIA —Feb 6, 2025— The Open Library Foundation (OLF) welcomes the BitCurator Consortium (BCC), a global leader in born-digital curation, as its newest member project. This partnership advances sustainable and innovative practices in digital preservation while enabling the BCC to benefit from OLF’s support and infrastructure as it expands its impact on digital curation.
Founded in 2014 with support from the Educopia Institute, the BitCurator Consortium was created to address the growing need for tools, training, and collaboration in digital curation. After a decade of successful operations under Educopia’s leadership, BCC announced its intent to identify a new fiscal sponsor. With its focus on collaboration, research, and open-source software development, the BCC’s transition to the Open Library Foundation provides critical operational support and enhanced opportunities for growth. This partnership reflects both organizations’ shared values and missions in driving innovation and sustainability within the cultural heritage sector.
President of the BCC Executive Council, Elena Colón-Marrero, explains the benefits of this partnership: “The Open Library Foundation shares many of the same values and mission goals as BCC, with the added benefit of being an organization deeply embedded in the needs and workings of libraries and cultural heritage institutions. OLF’s extensive experience in supporting the infrastructure of library and heritage initiatives will provide the BCC with crucial services as we look forward to the next 10 years of BCC.”
President of the OLF Board of Directors Tom Cramer says, “The BitCurator Consortium is deeply committed to open-source software, community-driven development, and advancing the practice of digital curation. With this partnership, OLF and our other member projects will only grow stronger with the addition of the BCC’s collaborative spirit, innovation, and drive for excellence.”
With the addition of the BitCurator Consortium, the Open Library Foundation continues to expand its diverse network of affiliate members and projects. This growing community of initiatives reinforces OLF’s commitment to advancing open-source solutions and fostering collaboration within libraries, archives, and cultural heritage organizations worldwide.
About the BitCurator Consortium
The BitCurator Consortium (BCC) promotes the development of innovative, sustainable curation of born-digital materials by any organization responsible for caring for such materials. The Consortium brings together representatives of all levels of experience from libraries, archives, museums, and related professions engaged in (or considering) digital archives work. Our organizational vision is to address the articulated needs of the BCC community—training, collaboration, research, software development, documentation, integration, scripts—while advocating for the expansion of digital forensics practice worldwide. For more information, see our website at https://bitcuratorconsortium.org/.
About the Open Library Foundation
The Open Library Foundation was created in 2016 as an unbiased, independent not-for-profit organization to ensure the availability, accessibility and sustainability of open source and open access projects for and by libraries. Software developed by communities hosted by the Foundation is freely available under standard open source licenses for personal, institutional or commercial use. The software is open and free in order to sustain an open collaboration of interested parties. The Foundation provides infrastructure by which the library community at large can organize, contribute to, and benefit from our projects — ensuring availability and a “safe haven” for member communities’ output that is separated from the needs and goals of any single contributor, user or affiliated party. Find out more at www.openlibraryfoundation.org.
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For more information, please contact:
BitCurator Consortium
bcc_exec@bitcuratorconsortium.org
The Open Library Foundation
mediainquiries@openlibraryfoundation.org