MetaArchive Cooperative sunset 2025; silent under-replication, manual Stanford rebuild

MetaArchive Cooperative operated for 20 years across institutions in three countries and nearly a dozen U.S. states, successfully preserved HBCU collections, born-digital objects, and digitized A/V recordings, and won the American Library Association's George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg Preservation Award in 2017.

The cooperative dissolved on March 31, 2025 after Educopia shifted its fiscal-sponsorship requirement to one full-time-equivalent staff member per community in January 2025, two members departed, and the operational reserve fell below policy threshold (S-0096).

Unlike DPN, MetaArchive operated the replication protocol on members' behalf — running LOCKSS automated polling that produced the distributed copies — and members had outsourced replication-state verification to the cooperative. When the eleven-month wind-down forced a comprehensive audit, the cooperative discovered "issues with insufficient replications and problems with the automated LOCKSS polling process" — automated polling had not been replicating content the way it advertised.

Recovery required collapsing the distributed architecture entirely — manually consolidating every member's content onto a new audit node at Stanford so it could be audited and rebuilt to a known-good baseline before being redistributed. By Educopia's own statement, "it was not possible to secure a permanent archival home for all of MetaArchive's materials within the sunset time frame."

The case is C-0028's silent-operational-failure mode at sectoral scale. No specific dataset has been documented as permanently lost in the public record, but the cooperative's own wind-down language acknowledges that not all materials reached permanent preservation, and the silent under-replication discovered during the sunset audit means pre-2025 loss within the cooperative cannot be ruled out.