Abstract
The Cyber-Infrastructure for Billions of Electronic Records (CI-BER) project is a collaborative big data management project based on the integration of heterogeneous datasets and multi-source historical and digital collections, including a place-based citizen-led crowdsourcing case study of the Southside neighborhood in Asheville, North Carolina. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) agencies. A test-bed collection containing nearly 100 million files and 50TB of data was developed, with content representing electronic Federal Government records from 150 federal agencies. The CI-BER project advances the state of the art in generalizable and extensible ultra-highly scalable data management architectures, potentially enabling robust technical preservation of, and access to, electronic records and digital data in the context of emerging national scale cyber-environments. A first-generation open source collaborative mapping environment prototype is currently being developed to support novel “citizen-led crowdsourcing” possibilities for archival material.