May 2016 – NDSA Blog

call for nominees: NDSA Coordinating Committee

Members of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance join together to form a consortium of over 165 partnering organizations, including universities, professional associations, businesses, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations, all committed to the long-term preservation of digital information. Committed to preserving access to our national digital heritage, we each offer our diverse skills, perspectives, experiences, cultures and orientations to achieve what we could not do alone.

NDSA’s Coordinating Committee (CC) provides strategic leadership to the community in coordination with working group co-chairs. Working on the CC is an opportunity to contribute your leadership for the community as a whole while collaborating with a wonderful group of dynamic and motivated professionals. NDSA is a diverse community, working on a critical mission and we seek candidates to join the CC that bring their diverse skills, perspectives, experiences, cultures and orientations to bear on leadership initiatives.

The CC is dedicated to ensuring a strategic direction for NDSA, to the advancement of NDSA activities to achieve strategic goals and furthering communication. One example of collaborative work within the community to further communication is the production of the National Agenda for Digital Stewardship. The CC is responsible for reviewing and approving NDSA membership applications and publications; updating eligibility standards for membership in the alliance, and other bylaws;engaging with stakeholders in the community; and working to enroll new members committed to our core mission. The CC commitment is for three years. NDSA has an annual membership meeting coordinated with the DLF Forum each fall. The CC meets at the annual meeting and via a monthly conference call.

If you are interested in joining the CC yourself, or want to nominate another member, please send the name, e-mail address, and NDSA-affiliated institution of the nominee to ndsa@diglib.org by June 15. We particularly encourage and welcome nominations of people from underrepresented groups and sectors.

Deadlines Extended! DLF LAC Pre-Conference, DLF Forum, and Digital Preservation 2016

We heard your wishes for more time to get a proposal in for one of these three great events coming to Milwaukee in November, so the planning committees for the DLF Liberal Arts Colleges Pre-Conference and Digital Preservation 2016 invite submissions in all categories until Monday, May 23, at 11:59PM PST. You can also still submit a proposal of any type for the DLF Forum until the same extended deadline, and proposals for Lightning Talks are particularly encouraged.

Access all three CFPs here: https://www.diglib.org/dlf-events/2016forum/cfp/

Submit a proposal using the online system: https://www.conftool.pro/dlf2016/

#DigiPres16 is the revival of the NDSA’s major conference on digital preservation and digital stewardship, at which we’ll present the 2016 NDSA Innovation Awards and more! #dlfLAC is a chance for DLF’s vibrant liberal arts colleges community to come together to focus on digital library and digital scholarship work in a liberal arts context. The #DLFforum brings digital library, archives, and museum practitioners together to set ambitious agendas, share new methods and experiments, develop best practices, and better organize our community to accomplish its shared mission.

The DLF Forum keynoter is Stacie Williams, and her talk will focus on labor issues in our field. Bergis Jules will keynote Digital Preservation 2016, with a talk focusing on the power and promise of diversity and inclusivity in digital preservation work. The Liberal Arts Colleges Pre-Conference keynoter will be announced soon.

We hope you are planning to join us in Milwaukee!

NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2016 keynoter is Bergis Jules!

We are very pleased to announce that Bergis Jules is our keynote speaker for Digital Preservation 2016 in Milwaukee! The theme for the NDSA conference is “Building Communities of Practice,” and Jules’ keynote on the afternoon of November 9 will help kick off the major meeting and conference of the NDSA—open to NDSA members and non-members alike—focusing on tools, techniques, theories and methodologies for digital stewardship and preservation, data curation, the content lifecycle, and related issues.

Jules’ keynote will focus on the power and promise of diversity and inclusivity in digital preservation work, and we will share a title and abstract in the coming months. Jules’ work on Documenting the Now and other projects related to archiving social media and social justice movements, in combination with his personal record of involvement in NDSA’s working groups, will no doubt help inform and inspire the intellectual exchange, community-building, development of best practices, and national-level agenda-setting in the field, expected at #digipres16. The deadline to submit a proposal for the rest of the program is May 15th!

Digital Preservation 2016 Keynote Speaker: Bergis Jules

Bergis Jules is the University and Political Papers Archivist at the University of California, Riverside library, where he manages university archives, political papers, African American collections, and community archives projects. His previous work with community archives and African American collections include leading projects at the Black Metropolis Research Consortium at the University of Chicago, and designing and securing grant funding for the D.C. Africana Archives Project at George Washington University. Bergis helps lead the Inland Empire Memories consortium at the University of California, Riverside library, which is a community owned consortium of cultural heritage organizations, with the goal of uncovering and sharing the extremely diverse history of inland Southern California. He is a co-director on a 2016 IMLS funded National Forum grant to host a series of meetings across the country that will explore strategies and tools for integrating community archives in the National Digital Platform. In addition to his community archives work, Bergis is interested in the rich potential that social media and web archives hold for contributing to more diverse library research collections by helping to counter existing silences in our historical records, through inclusion of more voices from traditionally marginalized communities. He is one of the principal investigators on a 2015 funded project for social media archiving from the Andrew Mellon Foundation titled, Documenting the Now: Supporting Scholarly Use and Preservation of Social Media Content. The goal of the project is to build an open source and cloud ready tool, that will capture tweets and their associated metadata and digital content for long term preservation by archivists and analysis by researchers and others. Bergis received an M.L.S. with a Specialization in Archives and Records Management and an M.A. in African American and African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University in 2009. Beginning in September 2016, he will be doctoral student in the History Department at the University of California, Riverside. Find him on Twitter @BergisJules.

Digital Preservation 2016 will be the first held in partnership with our new host organization, the Digital Library Federation (DLF). Separate calls are being issued for the DLF Liberal Arts Colleges Pre-Conference (6 November) and 2016 DLF Forum(7-9 November)—all happening in the same location. Proposals are due by May 15th at 11:59pm Pacific Time!