Looking to upgrade its ability to archive digital content in an era of increasingly electronic-only publications, the Library of Congress has reached a five-year agreement with Data Conversion Laboratory, an electronic document service. The deal is considered a major step in maintaining the LOC’s mandate to acquire and preserve digital publications.

The U.S. Copyright Office has established a small number of standardized digital formats in order to facilitate the collection and preservation of digital content for future researchers. The agreement with DCL, which is the first firm selected in this initiative, will make it easier for the Library of Congress to expand and maintain its collections at a time when serials, journals and publications of all kinds are increasingly abandoning print to publis in digital-only formats.

DCL was founded in 1981 and specializes in capturing and reformatting content from virtually any medium.

Mark Gross, president and CEO of DCL, said the company provided “similar services for a number of publishers,” and has “enhanced our robust infrastructure to make it easy for publishers to meet these new deposit requirements without requiring them to disrupt their own workflow.”