The Exploring Collaborations to Harness Objects in a Digital Environment for Preservation (ECHO DEPository) project aims to address the issues of how we collect, manage, preserve, and make useful the enormous amount of digital information our culture is now producing. Collecting, selecting and preserving digital information requires approaches and resources that are substantively different from those we have used traditionally.The project is a partnership among the University of Illinois; the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC); the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA); Tufts University's Perseus Project; the Michigan State University Library; and an alliance of state libraries from Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina and Wisconsin.More specifically, the project will develop criteria for selecting digital material for capture and preservation, with OCLC taking the lead to build software to help automate the process. Illinois, OCLC and NCSA will jointly provide storage for the digital content collected in the project in databases called “repositories” and will test real-world problems that are encountered in the process of digital archiving. The University of Illinois will also conduct research into issues surrounding the long-term semantic preservation of digital resources.