Digital Preservation Network dissolved 2018; integrity layer dissolved with coordinator

The Digital Preservation Network spent $7 million over its run as a coordinator among five federated Replicating Nodes (APTrust, Chronopolis, HathiTrust, Stanford Digital Repository, Texas Digital Library), latterly as a single-member LLC of Internet2 (2017-2018). DPN announced wind-down in December 2018 with 26 of 64 charter members ever having deposited content and membership at dissolution at 31 (S-0095).

Because DPN was a coordinator rather than an operator — actual storage living at the federated nodes, each a free-standing preservation service — the dissolution did not destroy any copies. The five nodes continued operating, and depositors transitioned individually by their ingest node.

What dissolved was the cross-node integrity layer: fixity audits across nodes, succession guarantees, and the consortium-level provenance layer that members had paid for. Depositors had to renegotiate preservation node by node on whatever terms each node offered in DPN's absence.

The case is C-0028's coordinator-dissolution failure mode in its purest form. The data did not vanish; the integrity contract did. From the depositor's perspective, what they had purchased — verified preservation across multiple nodes — became something else (preservation at a single node, with no consortium-level integrity verification). The architectural reading: integrity contracts that depend on a coordinator's continued operation are exactly as durable as the coordinator.