In December 2000, the U.S. Congress appropriated funds to the Library of Congress (LC) to spearhead an effort to develop a national strategy for the preservation of digital information. Understanding that the task cannot be accomplished by any one organization, Congress wrote into the appropriations language a requirement that LC work with other federal, scholarly, and nonprofit organizations to discuss the problem and produce a plan. The staff of the Library of Congress immediately scheduled a series of conversations with representatives from the technology, business, entertainment, academic, legal, archival, and library communities. LC asked the Council on Library and Information Resources to commission background papers for these sessions and to summarize the meetings. The resulting papers, along with an integrative essay by Amy Friedlander, are presented in this document.