March 2022 – NDSA Blog

NDSA Welcomes Four New Members

As of 8 March 2022, the NDSA Leadership unanimously voted to welcome its four 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.

Quantum Corp

Quantum Corp’s goal is to be the leading provider of management and storage services for unstructured data. They mainly focus on designing solutions to address the problems associated with managing and the storage of large data repositories and archives.

University of Cape Town Libraries

University of Cape Town Libraries is particularly interested in growing broad-based general awareness, basic understanding, and active participation in their digital preservation systems & services for the university as a whole. Their burgeoning network of Data Stewards & Champions, an interdisciplinary community of practice working to develop and maintain a vibrant, sustainable data culture, is an important vehicle for this.

Vanderbilt University Library

Vanderbilt University Library is interested in learning from others’ digital stewardship experiences as well as sharing theirs with the NDSA community. The Library currently holds digital archives with audiovisual, textual, and image-based content. They are using several different systems to archive them, including Glacier, ArchivesSpace, Archivematica, Fedora, and Portico. The Library preserves a number of collections, including the TVNews archive and Vanderbilt yearbooks.

WiLS (Wisconsin Library Services, Inc.)

WiLS is a non-profit membership organization that facilitates collaboration and innovation in order to advance library service in the state of Wisconsin and beyond. Since 2005, WiLS has provided consortium management and leadership for the Recollection Wisconsin statewide digital collections program. Notable and recent WiLS digital stewardship projects and initiatives include Recollection Wisconsin’s Curating Community Digital Collections program (IMLS), the Digital Readiness Community of Practice implementation project (NHPRC), mentorship of two national cohorts of tribal libraries engaged in community memory projects (through the IMLS’s Accelerating Promising Practices initiative), and their work with the Ho-Chunk Nation and other Wisconsin tribal communities to increase their capacity in digital collections development and management.

~ Hannah Wang, Vice Chair of the NDSA Coordinating Committee

NDSA and DPC Announce Cooperation on Awards Programs

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) and Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) are delighted to announce an agreement for close coordination and cooperation on their respective awards programs.

The NDSA began in 2010 as a global network of collaborative partners supplying advocacy, expertise, and support for the preservation of digital heritage, promoting a vision in which all digital material fundamentally important to our cultures receives appropriate, effective, and sustainable stewardship to protect and enhance its persistent value, availability, and (re)use. The annual NDSA Excellence Awards were established in 2012 to recognize and encourage exemplary achievement in the field of digital preservation stewardship. Since then, 53 awardees have been honored in Individual, Organization, Project, Sustainability, Educator, and Future Steward categories presented during the annual NDSA Digital Preservation conferences.

The DPC was established in 2002 to provide advocacy, community engagement, workforce development, capacity-building, good practice, and good governance in support of resilient long-term access to digital content and services. The biennial DPC Digital Preservation Awards began in 2005 to raise public awareness about digital preservation and to endorse and celebrate outstanding work in the field. Thirty-one honorees have been recognized in categories of Collaboration and Cooperation, Research and Innovation, Teaching and Communications, Distinguished Student Work, Safeguarding Digital Legacy, and Outstanding Initiative in Commerce, Industry, and the Third-Sector, as well as individual Fellowships.

The NDSA and DPC each originally focused on national concerns and membership. However, both now actively encompass and encourage broader international participation. In view of the overlapping scope of their goals, activities, members, and audience, and to avoid potential confusion regarding eligibility for their respective awards programs, the NDSA and DPC have agreed to a coordinated awards framework.

While both organizations will continue with their own awards programs, the NDSA Excellence Awards will move from an annual to a biennial basis interleaved with the DPC Digital Preservation Awards. Thus, each year the international digital preservation community can look forward to the presentation of a single set of awards. Activities performed in the two years prior to an Award’s presentation year are eligible for consideration. Additionally, each Awards program will invite representative participation of the other on their juries, to promote greater consistency in criteria and evaluation as well as helping ensure organizational continuity between the two programs. Both organizations will also amplify each other’s award-related communications via their own outreach channels.

This cooperation began with the NDSA’s 2021 Excellence Awards, when Sharon McMeekin, DPC Head of Workforce Development, participated in the judging by the NDSA Excellence Awards Working Group. Kari May, Digital Archives and Preservation Librarian at the University of Pittsburgh and NDSA Excellence Awards Working Group member, is similarly participating on the DPC Jury for its upcoming 2022 Digital Preservation Awards. There will not be an NDSA Excellence Awards presentation in 2022; that will next take place in 2023.

“We are delighted with our new cooperative approach with the DPC,” says Krista Oldham, University Archivist at Texas A&M University and co-chair of the NDSA Excellence Awards Working Group. “It provides a more consolidated process and greater public visibility for honoring exemplary activity throughout the worldwide digital preservation community.”

”The Digital Preservation Awards are designed to endorse and celebrate outstanding work in digital preservation,” explains Sarah Middleton, Head of Advocacy and Communications for the DPC and coordinator of the Digital Preservation Awards. “Synchronizing and sharing the spotlight with the NDSA Excellence Awards in this way means we are able to highlight even more work which deserves that recognition.”

More information about the NDSA and DPC awards programs and other organizational initiatives is available on the NDSA and DPC websites or by contacting ndsa.digipres@gmail.com or info@dpconline.org.

Call for Proposals open for NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2022!

The NDSA is very pleased to announce that the Call for Proposals (CFP) is open for Digital Preservation 2022: Preserving Legacy (#DigiPres22) to be held on October 12-13, 2022 at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland.

Submissions from members and nonmembers alike are welcome, and you can learn more about session format options through the CFPs. The deadline to submit proposals is Monday, April 25, 2022, at 11:59 pm Eastern Time.

View the CFP and Submit

Digital Preservation 2022 is held in partnership with NDSA’s host organization, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).

NDSA strives to create a safe, accessible, welcoming, and inclusive event and adheres to DLF’s Code of Conduct as well as the DLF Forum Health Protocols.

We look forward to seeing you at DigiPres22!

~ 2022 DigiPres Planning Committee

Separate calls are being issued for CLIR’s 2022 events:

Learn@DLF (October 9) is the dedicated workshop series for digging into tools, techniques, workflows, and concepts. Through engaging, hands-on sessions, attendees will gain experience with new tools and resources, exchange ideas, and develop and share expertise with fellow community members.

The 2022 DLF Forum (October 10-12), DLF’s signature event, includes digital library practitioners and others from member institutions and the broader community, for whom it serves as a meeting place, marketplace, and congress. Find the call for proposals here: https://forum2022.diglib.org/calls-for-proposals/

The Digitizing Hidden Collections Symposium (October 12-13): event will create opportunities for reflection on the current state and future potential of digitization practice in collecting institutions, including how the digital cultural record can better reflect the diversity of human thought and experience, how law and ethics affect strategies for access, and how technologies and standards can improve discovery and learning. Find the call for proposals here: https://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/events/2022-symposium/call-for-proposals/

Calls for Proposals for 2022 CLIR Events are Now Live

Join us in Baltimore October 9-13, 2022; October 9: Learn@DLF; October 10-12: 2022 DLF Forum, October 12-13: NDSA Digital Preservation/Digitizing Hidden Collections symposium

CLIR/DLF is delighted to share our Calls for Proposals for CLIR’s 2022 events, happening in person in Baltimore, Maryland.

Our events will take place on the following dates:

- The DLF Forum (#DLFforum, October 10-12), our signature event, includes digital library practitioners and others from member institutions and the broader community, for whom it serves as a meeting place, marketplace, and congress. This year, the Forum’s guiding focus is gratitude. Learn more and check out the CFP here
- Learn@DLF (#LearnAtDLF, October 9) is our pre-conference workshop day for digging into tools, techniques, workflows, and concepts. Through engaging, hands-on sessions, attendees will gain experience with new tools and resources, exchange ideas, and develop and share expertise with fellow community members. The CFP for Learn@DLF is incorporated with the Forum’s and can be found here.
- NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2022: Preserving Legacy (#DigiPres22, October 12-13), NDSA’s major meeting and conference, will help to chart future directions for both the NDSA and digital stewardship, and is expected to be a crucial venue for intellectual exchange, community-building, development of best practices, and national-level agenda-setting in the field. Learn more and check out the CFP for this year’s event here.
CLIR’s Digitizing Hidden Collections Symposium (#digHC, October 12-13), is a two-day event for CLIR’s Digitizing Hidden Collections grant recipients and the wider library and archives communities to celebrate and reflect on five years of project work. Recipients’ collective experiences will create opportunities to discuss the current state and future potential of digitization practice in collecting institutions. Learn more and check out the CFP here.

For all events, we encourage proposals from members and non-members; regulars and newcomers; digital library practitioners and those in adjacent fields such as institutional research and educational technology; and students, early-career professionals and senior staff alike. We especially welcome proposals from folks who can bring diverse professional and life experiences to the conference, including those from minority racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds, immigrants, veterans, those with disabilities, and people of all sexual orientations or gender identities.

Session options range from 5-minute lighting talks at the Forum to half-day workshops at Learn@DLF, with many options in between.

The deadline for all opportunities is Monday, April 25, at 11:59pm Eastern Time.

If you have any questions, please write to us at forum@diglib.org, and be sure to subscribe to our Forum newsletter to stay up on all Forum-related news. If you’d like to know more about our Covid-19 Health Protocols, click here. We’re looking forward to seeing you this fall.

-Team DLF