Month: July 2020

 

Nominations are now being accepted for the NDSA 2020 Innovation Awards.

Anthony Cocciolo won a 2012 Innovation Award in the Individual category. He was recognized for his innovative approaches to teaching digital preservation practices, in particular his work partnering classes with archival institutions to work on the digitization and digital preservation of analog audio collections. Cocciolo is currently the Dean of the Pratt Institute School of Information.

 

What have you been doing since receiving an NDSA Innovation Award? 

In 2012, I was an Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute School of Information.  In 2020, I am still at Pratt, but now I am the Dean of the School.  I still teach the course “Projects in Digital Archives,” where the class is teamed up with a local archive to do digital archives projects, and what I had received the NDSA award for.  You can find this recent article from Pratt about some of the recent work going on in the class, which has included a lot of early LGBTQ+ radio and TV preservation work.

These days I oversee the School of Information, which is the oldest information school in North America, having started training librarians in 1890.  Today the school is based in Manhattan and enrolls about 230 graduate students across several Masters programs.  The pandemic has kept things challenging, as we work to return to campus in the fall, address issues for international students, and work to keep each other healthy and safe.

What did receiving the NDSA Innovation award in 2012 mean to you?

I think it really helped solidify my interests in digital preservation.  I am still very much involved with digital preservation work.  Pratt, in collaboration with NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program (MIAP), has taken over the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) program from Library of Congress in 2018.  Just recently we received a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to restore activity to the project, relaunching it as DPOE Network (DPOE-N), which is exciting.  You can find out more about the project at dpoe.network.

What efforts, advances, or ideas over the last 5-8 years have caught your attention or interest in the area of digital stewardship?

I think that audiovisual preservation is finally getting more attention now than it did back in 2012.  I wrote a book back in 2017 called Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists that argued that analog audio and video needed to be digitized, and I am happy to see that idea is viewed as more positively these days.

Overall, I am just happy to see the spread of digital stewardship and the notion that digital materials do not just preserve themselves, and that digital devices are where information of enduring value is largely created.

As the Dean at Pratt Institute School of Information, how has pedagogy grown and/or innovated as it relates to digital stewardship and digital preservation?

I think my pedagogy is largely the same (e.g., having students work on real-world problems in teams), I do try to keep it interesting by changing up the projects.  The past year we were starting to work on repairing open reel tapes with broken splices for digitization when the pandemic hit (the materials we finished are available here). Other times I have had students work on born-digital project with lots of forgotten file formats.  We’ve done projects featuring U.S. Presidents (e.g., digitizing photographs from the New York Times’ “morgue”), early Gay TV programs on U-Matic tape and more.  The variety keeps things interesting.

What are some priorities or challenges you see for digital stewardship?

I do think that audiovisual continues to be a challenge and priority. Trying to buy U-Matic VTRs for digitization is getting increasingly difficult.  I think web archiving, while with some exciting newer advancements (like the WebRecorder), still needs more attention and coordinated work.  Digital preservation education is still a needs area, as we do still see examples where archives/special collections have not made the transition to collection born-digital materials.  I am hopeful that the DPOE-N project mentioned earlier will help address this need.

Nominations are now being accepted for the NDSA 2020 Innovation Awards.

Mat Kelly won a 2012 Innovation Award in the Future Steward category when he was a graduate student at Old Dominion University. He won the award in recognition of his work on WARCreate, a Google Chrome extension that allows users to create a Web ARChive (WARC) file from any browsable web page. Kelly is currently an assistant professor in the Information Science department at Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics. 

What have you been doing since receiving an NDSA Innovation Award?

I was a Master’s degree student at Old Dominion University’s Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group when I received the award. The award brought to light in the web archiving community some aspects of preservation that were being neglected due to technical difficulties and the need for more work and research on web archiving. My MS thesis partially entailed the work for which I received the NDSA Innovation Award. After receiving my MS in 2012, I continued onto my PhD with the same group and defended my PhD dissertation, pertaining to the same subject for which I received the award, in 2019. I have since taken a position as a tenure track assistant professor in the Information Science department at Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics. I continue to focus my research of neglected aspects of web archiving that continue to remain a difficult area to explore due to the nature of the medium.

What did receiving the NDSA award mean to you?

The award gave credence that the programmatic work I was doing was worthwhile. The focus of the tool for which I was awarded was not just to create software, but demonstrate the need for simple user interfaces with powerful, standards-based approaches to encourage individuals to be able to archive the part of the web they care about. This helped to seed further research in the area, both for myself as well as others.

What efforts/advances/ideas of the last few years have you been impressed with or admired in the field?

I am in awe at the Webrecorder project, particularly the work of Ilya Kreymer. I appreciate the efforts the organization has done to encourage personal preservation and to do so with with usable software that does not need to rely on a central endpoint or institution for web archiving. Additionally, I have also been impressed with the breadth of the research performed by the other members of the WS-DL research group under the supervision of Drs. Michael L. Nelson and Michele C. Weigle. They have managed students taking interdisciplinary approaches toward neglected but necessary areas of research beyond the computer science area under which they are housed.

What advice do you have for future stewards in the digital preservation field?

The project for which I was awarded did not have an end-goal of attaining notoriety, though it was a pleasant surprise early in my career as a graduate student. It was a passion project to fill a need for those that want to accomplish something but may not have the technical know-how. This is a common occurrence. I would encourage others to further explore the area and exercise the skills for which they have expertise to determine a niche to which they can contribute.

Is there anything else we didn’t ask that you’d like to add?

I am thankful for the NDSA for considering me for the award early in my academic career and for my research group fostering innovation and enabling the opportunity to use what was once a passion project to have greater impact than it would have originally.

As we close in on the end of July we celebrate 10 years of the NDSA!!  

NDSA was initiated by the Library of Congress as a way to sustain and increase partnerships created through the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP).  Participants of NDIIPP were many of the initial members of NDSA.  There were 58 members in 2010, with membership now standing at over 250 in 2020.  Bill LeFurgy, one of the creators of NDSA, discusses the development and history of NDSA as part of NDIIPP, which, incidentally, would have turned 20 in December, and has a report on their first 10 years available as well. 

NDSA started with four groups developed to foster communication and partnerships which has grown in ten years to include three standing Interest groups and at least nine Working groups.  Working groups allow members to focus on specific activities of interest which often produce reports or documentation for the wider community to benefit from.  

In 2016 the Library of Congress passed along the role of Host Institution to the Digital Library Federation (DLF). The DLF has been a good home for the NDSA as well as including DigiPres, the annual NDSA Digital Preservation conference, in their own conference activity planning.   

NDSA is well known for the Agenda for Digital Stewardship and the Levels of Preservation, both with recent updates and publications. NDSA Interest and Working groups have also been busy over the years publishing survey reports (9), case studies (5), and topical interest research pieces (4).  These materials can be found on the NDSA OSF site and the Publications section of the website.  We have taken a renewed approach to strategic planning and transparency to the wider preservation community. We have also expanded significantly into the international scene with new members and partners from across the globe. There is also increased representation at the leadership level, including the elected Coordinating Committee as well as the co-chairs for Interest and Working groups, bringing the Leadership Team to over 20 individuals. 

Moving into the next 10 years, we recognize preservation is a global challenge and as such, we hope to continue expanding our international collaborations and increase our research output and advocacy to help all levels within our preservation community.  NDSA would not exist without you and we want to thank you for 10 amazing years and look forward to approaching the next ten together!

We always welcome new ideas and perspectives, so please feel free to share your thoughts, ideas, and feedback! Email us ndsa.digipres@gmail.com.