It’s here, the 2021 NDSA Fixity Survey!

Do you manage and preserve content? If so, we’d like to know what your fixity practices are! The NDSA Fixity Working Group is back again, with our latest iteration of the NSDA Fixity survey. Please contribute to our longitudinal research designed to gain insight into how organizations worldwide use various fixity methods to ensure the stability of their digital content and to learn how real-world capacity and best practices differ.  

The survey is available until June 18, 2021. The survey is expected to take approximately 20-25 minutes to complete. To assist with completing the survey all of the survey questions can be viewed in advance by following the link to this Google PDF.

Interested in the results of our previous study done in 2017? Please check it out on the code book, data, and report on the 2017 Fixity Survey OSF page

If you have questions or concerns about this survey, please contact the NDSA Fixity Working Group at NDSA-FIXITY@lists.clir.org.

Thank you for helping NDSA and our community define and advance digital preservation!

~ The NDSA Fixity Survey Working Group

Announcing the NDSA Excellence Awards!

The NDSA Excellence Awards Working Group (formerly the Innovation Awards Working Group) is excited to announce the expansion and renaming of the awards to recognize the important contributions that are being made in the areas of sustainability and maintenance. The NDSA Excellence Awards will highlight and commend all forms of creative and meaningful contributions by individuals, projects, sustainability activities, organizations, future stewards, and educators to the field of digital preservation.

Prior winners of the “Future Stewards” award originally proposed the change and worked together with the Excellence Awards Working Group to make it possible. Please see below for more information!


When reflecting on the 2020 NDSA Digital Preservation conference, much of our conversation centered around the “What’s Wrong with Digital Stewardship: Evaluating the Organization of Digital Preservation Programs from Practitioners’ Perspectives” panel discussion, based on the eponymous paper by Karl Blumenthal, Peggy Griesinger, Julia Y. Kim, Shira Peltzman, and Vicky Steeves. Like many practitioners in the field, the paper identified themes and articulated scenarios we had experienced or observed ourselves, particularly around issues of labor, leadership, and funding.

We wondered what we could, and should, do to better acknowledge and celebrate digital stewards for under-recognized maintenance work, and coalesced on proposing a new NDSA award category focused on maintenance and sustainability work, as well as renaming the awards to reflect an expanded scope beyond innovation. We’re each recipients of Future Steward awards, and reached out to the other Future Stewards to co-sign our proposal; we are grateful for their support in collectively raising our voices to suggest change in order to best reflect the state of the field. You can read our proposal here.

-Samantha Abrams, Elizabeth England, and Lauren Work


The Excellence Awards Working Group sees this as one small step, as there is much more work to be done to shift from the continued use of “innovation” as a main driver for recognition not just within the field, but by organizations’ leadership and funders. In short – we need YOU! Review the new Excellence Awards structure here, particularly the newly added Sustainability Award, and get ready to nominate colleagues in a few weeks!

German Translation for the 2019 Levels of Preservation Matrix Now Available

GERMAN TRANSLATION FOR THE 2019 LEVELS OF PRESERVATION MATRIX 

The 2019 NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation Matrix has been translated into German. Please find a link to the German translation below. 

Citation information and a link to the German translation is as follows: 

Lindlar, Micky (Orcid: 0000-0003-3709-5608); Rudnik, Pia (Orcid: 0000-0003-4081-9646)  (2021). NDSA 2019 Digital Preservation Levels Translation: German Translation of Version 2.0. 

2.0 in German https://osf.io/3na96/ and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4718661 

Translators’ note:

In the English version of the Levels of Digital Preservation, the term “content” is used synonymously with “digital content” (see https://www.dpconline.org/blog/introducing-the-new-ndsa-levels-of-preservation).

In the German translation, the term “content” is translated as “digital content” in each of the four levels and in the associated catalog of measures. This makes it clear that the measures described in the LoPs refer to digital (content) objects with both physical, logical and semantic properties and that the focus is not only on semantic-intellectual content. 

The functional areas “Control” and “Content” have been provided with additions in the German translation for the purpose of better understanding and for conciseness; these additions are in parenthesis in each case: In the “(Zugriffs-)Kontrolle” functional area, the control measures described refer primarily to access rights for persons and software applications and to associated access measures (such as deleting a file). The addition of “(essenzielle Eigenschaften)” to the “Content” functional area was made to clarify that the measures described here relate in particular to technical properties, such as file formats, which are regarded essential for digital content in the context of long-term archiving. 

The additions were made in consultation with the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation Steering Committee. 

*If you would be interested in translating the Levels of Digital Preservation V2.0 into another language please contact us at ndsa.digipres@gmail.com.  

 

DEUTSCHE ÜBERSETZUNG DER 2019 LEVELS OF PRESERVATION MATRIX 

Die 2019 NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation Matrix wurden ins Deutsche übersetzt. Die deutsche Übersetzung ist über den unten aufgeführten Link erreichbar. 

Zitiationsangabe und Link auf die deutsche Übersetzung: 

Lindlar, Micky (Orcid: 0000-0003-3709-5608); Rudnik, Pia (Orcid: 0000-0003-4081-9646) (2021). NDSA 2019 Digital Preservation Levels Translation: German Translation of Version 2.0. 

2.0 auf Deutsch https://osf.io/3na96/ und https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4718661 

Anmerkung zur Übersetzung:

In der englischen Version der Levels of Digital Preservation wird die Bezeichnung “content” synonym zu “digital content” verwendet (s. https://www.dpconline.org/blog/introducing-the-new-ndsa-levels-of-preservation)

In der deutschen Übersetzung wird der Begriff “content” in den vier Levels sowie in dem dazugehörigen Maßnahmenkatalog jeweils als “digitaler Inhalt” übersetzt. Dies macht deutlich, dass sich die in den LoPs beschriebenen Maßnahmen auf digitale (Inhalts-)Objekte mit sowohl physischen, logischen als auch semantischen Eigenschaften beziehen und der Fokus nicht nur auf semantisch-intellektuellen Inhalten liegt. 

Die Funktionsbereiche “Control” und “Content” sind in der deutschen Übersetzung zum Zwecke der besseren Verständlichkeit und zur Konkretisierung mit Ergänzungen versehen worden, die jeweils in Klammern stehen: Im Funktionsbereich “(Zugriffs-)Kontrolle” beziehen sich die beschriebenen Kontroll-Maßnahmen vordergründig auf die Zugriffsrechte für Personen und Softwareanwendungen und auf damit verbundene Zugriffsmaßnahmen (wie z.B. Löschen einer Datei). Die Ergänzung des Funktionsbereichs “Inhalt” um den Zusatz “(essenzielle Eigenschaften)” wurde vorgenommen, um zu verdeutlichen, dass sich die hier beschriebenen Maßnahmen insbesondere auf technische Eigenschaften wie zum Beispiel Dateiformate beziehen, die im Kontext der Langzeitarchivierung als essenziell für digitale Inhalte angesehen werden. 

Die Ergänzungen erfolgten in Abstimmung mit dem NDSA “Levels of Digital Preservation” Steering Committee. 

 

 

 

 

 

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