Welcome Seven new NDSA Member Organizations

As of 14 December 2021, the NDSA Leadership voted to welcome its seven most recent applicants into the membership. Each new member brings a host of skills and experience to our group. Keep an eye out for them on your calls and be sure to give them a shout out; please join me in welcoming our new members. To review our list of members, you can see them here.

In addition to approving new memberships, the Coordinating Committee also voted to remove 14 members in 2021. These members were removed after several years of no contact, despite multiple attempts to try. It is vital that NDSA members keep their contacts updated, if you’ve had changes in our organization, please complete the Membership Contact Update form. More information about updating your contacts can be found on the Member Orientation webpage.

Digital Library of the Caribbean

Founded in 2004, the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) has grown from nine founding partners to over seventy partners in the United States, the Caribbean, Canada, Central and South America, and Europe. dLOC is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC supports collaborative project development and initiatives for digitization, preservation, rights, integration with teaching and research, and more. These activities complement the work by the dLOC partners, who contribute content, time, and expertise in shared governance.

University of Wisconsin-Madison General Library System

The University of Wisconsin-Madison General Library System is developing a Digital Preservation Repository, with partial support from the Mellon Foundation. The development of a digital preservation repository is a critical step towards strengthening our capacity to preserve digital objects and artifacts, e.g. texts, images, recordings, electronic theses and dissertations, and ensuring that these research resources will remain accessible for future generations of scholars.

The ARK Alliance

The ARK Alliance is heir to the successful ARKs-in-the-Open initiative, which began in 2018 with the goal of launching an open, global community around Archival Resource Keys (ARKs) and their use as persistent identifiers in the scholarly ecosystem. The community comprises institutions and people who use or assign Archival Resource Key (ARK) identifiers as well as those interested in promoting ARKs and sustaining the open ARK infrastructure. The Alliance supports an advanced, full-featured resolver (N2T) and are creating standardized persistence statements and metadata for describing structured objects via ARK inflections.

Black Beauty Archives

Black Beauty Archives (BBA) mission is to preserve, document and celebrate the history of Black Beauty culture by providing open access to original materials. BBA collects rare beauty magazines, books, cosmetic advertisements, press photos, Black owned cosmetics and Black Cosmetic meme’s to expand the narrative of Black Beauty Culture in America and across the African Diaspora. Their primary goal is access so they prioritize digitization in their work, as well as capturing and collecting oral histories from Black professionals within the Beauty Industry.

University of the District of Columbia

The University of the District of Columbia (UDC) is an institution of higher education that has been in operation since 1851. UDC is vitally important to their community and have long played a role in local African American history. UDC has a large archival collection that they plan to digitize. They are in the process of digitizing our collection as much as time and financial resources allow. UDC focuses on collecting, preserving, and providing access to the history of UDC and its predecessor institutions.

City of La Porte, Texas

The City Secretary’s Office for the City of La Porte, Texas, seeks to provide, enhance, and support the highest records and information management standards and practices appropriate for our organization and to the benefit of our community. The mission of the Office of the City Secretary is to record all actions of the City Council, see to the administration City elections, guarantee the authenticity and provide for the safekeeping and retrieval of all official documents, and the City’s records management program, and fulfill public information requests. The Office of the City Secretary supports the City’s goal of public transparency.

CLOCKSS

CLOCKSS is a community governed and supported digital preservation archive for scholarly content, entrusted with the care of more than 46 million journal articles and 250,000 books plus critical metadata and software. CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) employs a unique approach to archiving (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) that was initiated by Stanford University librarians in 1999. Digital content is stored in the CLOCKSS archive with no user access unless a “trigger” event occurs.

~Nathan Tallman, NDSA Vice Chair

2021 NDSA Membership Survey Report

The Task Force on Membership Engagement is excited to announce the publication of the results of the first 2021 NDSA Membership Survey Report. The 22-question survey was completed by 31 respondents over a 2-week period. This report details the outcomes of the inaugural membership survey that was distributed to members in July 2021. Topics discussed below included, membership benefits analysis, mentorship, member engagement, member satisfaction, and alternative membership models/membership dues.

Some major takeaways from the report include:

Community involvement, access to resources, and educational opportunities were important factors in members’ decisions to join and or continue their membership in NDSA.
Learning about and contributing to digital preservation practices, having decision-making power at the Working Group and Interest Group level (e.g., deciding on work plans and work products), and helping develop community-based durable solutions to a dynamically changing preservation landscape as the most valued membership benefits.
When asking members to rate their membership satisfaction on a scale of 1-5, responses showed that 73% of survey participants were satisfied with membership.

Thank you to all NDSA members who participated in the survey. We appreciate your time and effort spent in providing the information to us.

Thank you to the members of the Task Force on Membership Engagement who worked over the last 10 months to make the report possible.

-Task Force on Membership Engagement

Call for Volunteers for the NDSA DigiPres 2022 Planning Committee

The NDSA calls for volunteers to join our Planning Committee for Digital Preservation 2022.

Digital Preservation (DigiPres) is the NDSA’s annual conference – open to members and non-members alike – focused on stewardship, curation, and preservation of digital information and cultural heritage. The 2022 meeting will take place on October 12-13, 2022, in Baltimore, Maryland, just after the DLF Forum.

NDSA is an affiliate of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Digital Library Federation (DLF), and the DigiPres conference is held in concert with the annual DLF Forum. CLIR continues to monitor the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and after successfully pivoting to a virtual format for 2020 and 2021, we are hoping to be back to a version of in-person conferencing for 2022.

Planning Committee responsibilities include:

Defining a vision for the conference
Crafting and distributing a Call for Proposals
Reviewing and selecting proposals
Identifying a keynote speaker
Determining the conference schedule
Moderating sessions
Supporting membership through recruitment and mentorship efforts
Collaborating with the DLF Forum planning committee on community events, equity and inclusion, and sponsorship opportunities

We expect to have monthly group calls from January-November, with some periods being busier than others. For instance, in the months of May-June 2022, there will be an uptick in the work during the period where we create the schedule as it requires concentrated effort.

Join us by completing this form by Friday, January 14th, and please share widely.

We look forward to working with you!

~ Jes Neal, 2022 Chair

~ Stacey Erdman, 2022 Vice-Chair/2023 Chair