Sun Microsystems and Endeavor Information Systems, an Elsevier Company, will create solutions for managing and preserving cultural and academic assets worldwide.

The global digital repositories and preservation technologies will protect critical educational, cultural and historical information.

Universities, libraries and museums are tasked with preserving massive, almost incomprehensible amounts of content, as well as ensuring its availability to the appropriate audiences. Without digital preservation, many of the critical materials for research, education and cultural benefit could be lost due to data format changes, media migration, bit loss, application/operating environment shifts and unavailable access.

In this partnership, Endeavor Information Systems brings software expertise in architecting industry-leading digital library management solutions and Sun, infrastructure technologies such as Solaris 10 Operating System, in order to create the next-generation platform for digital preservation and storage. Endeavor will also bring to market Elsevier’s depth of knowledge and experience in managing large scale content repositories with millions of assets. This combination will enable libraries, universities and museums to more easily and securely convert, store, manage and distribute their informational assets.

“By combining the industry-leading strength of Sun’s infrastructure with Endeavor’s digital library expertise and large base of potential customers in key markets, we have the winning formula for helping institutions meet their archiving and preservation challenges.”, said Kim Jones, vice president, global education and research at Sun Microsystems.

“The next step in our partnership will create secure, easy-to-use solutions to enable federated access to content and digital repositories. And as we develop future architectures, we will continue to embrace open standards to ensure our customers that new solutions can work with legacy systems, as well as emerging technologies.”, said Roland Dietz, president and chief executive officer, Endeavor Information Systems.