NDSA’s Evolutionary Leadership

Echoing the sentiments of other colleagues, digital preservation is not a state that is achieved; rather it is a comprehensive set of managed activities that are necessary to provide continued access to digital objects, beyond the limits of media failure or technological change. Similarly, leadership within an organization, especially one that is 100% volunteer driven, is not a state that is achieved, but one that is, or should, be constantly evolving. The continuous evolution of leadership can be attained through sound organizational governance.

To avoid getting caught in the traps of “cult of personality” leadership, or let’s just re-elect so-and-so, NDSA instituted term limits and staggered terms for its elected Coordinating Committee (CC) members. More recently it has established a form of Chair and Vice Chair leadership for the CC. A Vice Chair is elected from the CC and serves for one year in that role, shadowing the current Chair. The following year they succeed as the next Chair; as such they must have at least two years left in their current term when elected as Vice Chair.

In 2021, I became the first Vice Chair to become Chair. This year, Nathan Tallman, Digital Preservation Librarian for Penn State University, and my former Vice Chair has become the CC’s new Chair. We have elected Hannah Wang, Educopia’s Community Facilitator for the MetaArchive Cooperative, as the 2022 Vice Chair. Please join me in congratulating and welcoming our new leaders!

~ Dan Noonan, Past Chair

Scheduling Changes for NDSA Interest Groups

Starting this month, February 2022, the NDSA Interest Groups will be moving to a rotating quarterly call schedule. This will help members who have wanted to participate in multiple Interest groups but didn’t have the time for two or more calls a month. It will also give Interest Group Co-Chairs more time and flexibility to plan these calls, while also creating opportunities for more cross-group pollination activities, such as quarterly themes and cross-group networking calls.

Each Interest Group will meet once every three months, on the following schedule:

January 10: Standards & Practices
February 2: Content
March 21: Infrastructure
April 11: Standards & Practices
May 4: Content
June 20: Infrastructure
July 11: Standards & Practices
August 3: Content
September 19: Infrastructure
October 10: Standards & Practices
November 5: Content
December 19: Infrastructure

The updated schedule is reflected on the NDSA Calendar.

As a reminder, NDSA now has a Slack Workspace. Each Interest Group has a channel if you would like to continue conversations between Interest Group meetings. Join one, or join them all. Our workspace address and join link is available on each of the Interest Group meeting note documents.

~ From the Co-Chairs of the Content, Standards & Practices, and Infrastructure Interest Groups

2022 Update from the Levels of Digital Preservation Steering Group

What happened with the Levels in 2021?

Like many of us, a free recall of what we accomplished in 2021 was a bit harder than expected. However, here is a brief list:

The Teaching, Advocacy, and Outreach group finalized their materials and published to OSF for anyone to use (see their blog post for more information)
Multiple presentations to various groups interested in the Levels
Discussing and responding to feedback provided to us in our feedback form
Regular Steering Meetings (seems simple but you know, 2021…)

Looking ahead

We have a lot on our collective plates for 2022. Here is a brief list of what is top of mind for the Steering Group:

Create bi-monthly office hours for anyone interested in the Levels of Digital Preservation (NDSA members and beyond!) to drop in and discuss a given topic as well as general business, guest speakers, collaboration updates, etc.
Explore interest in specific Levels expansion sets via public office hours
- Economic factors
- Risk
- Environmental impacts
- Access
Formalize governance structure for Steering and various subgroups
Continue to track and parse impact of the Levels as well as gather feedback.

Levels in Translation

Also, we are proud to update you on the multi-lingual progress of the Levels. To date, there are translations in Arabic, Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. This is an amazing indicator of community engagement and use of the Levels. If you are working on a translation, let us know!

Levels Invitation: Join us

Finally, as we are looking ahead to the work we note above, we would like to extend an invitation to join the Levels of Digital Preservation Steering Group. We hope to match up expertise and creativity with some of the elements we have identified for exploration in 2022. We have created a brief submission form for you to indicate interest and outline the role you would like to play in helping us shape the next iteration.

Thank you to all of you who continue to use, adapt, and promote the NDSA Levels – this is a community standard – one which needs to remain both vibrant and useful to the digital preservation community. We rely on you to help us. If there is anything you think we need to dive into, please use the form or plan on joining one of our office hour sessions. Those should start up in the Spring so keep an eye out!

Just a reminder that we continue to accept feedback – please use this to reach out to the team or give us your thoughts!

Bradley Daigle, Chair

On behalf of the Levels Steering Group

2021 DigiPres Recordings Available… and More!

The recordings of the 2021 Digital Preservation Conference: Embracing Digitality are now available as a playlist on the NDSA YouTube Channel! If you missed a session during the conference – or perhaps didn’t have the opportunity to attend – now is your chance to catch up on all the great stuff you may have missed. Many thanks to our DLF conference counterparts for posting these.

Additionally, a page has been created on the NDSA OSF site called NDSA’s Digital Preservation Conference Links. This will provide a centralized location to find links to past years’ conference materials. This page uses the wiki to link to the slides and recordings of available DigiPres conference sessions.

Much gratitude to our NDSA community and beyond for making #DigiPres21 one for the books. Stay tuned for more information about the 2022 conference!

Onwards and upwards,

Tricia Patterson (2021 Chair)

Service Opportunities within NDSA

Are you looking to get more involved with NDSA? Do you need to ramp up your service? NDSA is currently recruiting new co-chairs for the Standards & Practices and Content Interest Groups.

Interest Group Co-chairs host regular virtual meetings around topics of interest to NDSA members and the digital curation community, participate in monthly Leadership calls, and contribute to the strategic direction of NDSA. Interest groups may also engage in other activities of interest to members, such as developing educational materials. The NDSA Leadership team works collaboratively and provides support for interest group development. Terms are typically two years and are renewable. You can find out more about being a co-chair at Co-Chairing and NDSA Group.

The Standards and Practices Interest Group works to facilitate a broad understanding of the role and benefit of standards in digital preservation and how to use them effectively to ensure durable and usable collections. The Content Interest Group explores a broad array of topics related to preserving digital content, including: viable approaches to institutional collaboration; sharing strategies to address issues of scale and complexity; and the development of policies, practices, and community action to promote ethical and sustainable labor for digital stewardship.

If you’re interested in becoming a co-chair, please contact the current co-chairs to let them know. Any member of NDSA Leadership would be happy to answer any questions!

Standards & Practice: Felicity Dykas (DykasF [at] MISSOURI [dot] EDU)

Content: Brenda Burk (bburk [at] clemson [dot] edu) and Deb Verhoff (deb [dot] verhoff [at] nyu [dot] edu)

~ Nathan Tallman
NSDA Chair

NDSA Year in Review

Happy New Year!

As we begin 2022 we wanted to take a moment to look back at what we’ve done over the past year. One of the big shifts the Leadership team made was starting to review membership applications quarterly – welcoming a total of 23 new members in January, March, June, September, December. More about this process is available on the NDSA membership website along with details for how existing members can learn how to keep their contact information up to date.

Interest Groups

The three NDSA Interest Groups continued to meet on a monthly basis. A summary of their activities follows:

Content Interest Group

The Content Interest Group hosts a monthly call for NDSA members who are interested in preservation activities broadly related to content. Recent calls focused on topics around ethical work practices, email preservation and making a shift from bit level preservation to content based decision making.

This past year, we’ve been experimenting with the format for these calls. For Content Exchanges, we invite members to lead us in a conversation about a topic of interest to the group. Sometimes they have experience to draw from and sometimes, we are exploring new territory together. We look for ways to engage in dialogue in order to learn from one another and make connections that might further our work or scholarship. In another series, Sharing Scholarship, we invite members to present their research in early stages in order to gather feedback and identify partners when possible.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure Interest Group spent 2021 both continuing as we have in the past by hosting presentations on topics of interest, as well as investigating new ways to meet group members’ needs. We held several meetings where we invited meeting attendees to bring their challenges and questions to the group to be discussed and to get suggestions for solutions. These topics ranged from discussing datasets, shifting to using cloud infrastructure, collection policies, and dynamically adjusting collection storage infrastructures. In our more topic focused meetings, the group covered:

Fixity in the cloud
The Oxford Common File Layout (OFCL)
Information security
The environmental impact of digital preservation
Exploring characterization
Experience with RDM (research data management) systems
DNA storage for digital preservation

Standards and Practices Group

The Standards and Practices Interest Group focused on standards for policies for digital preservation during 2021. We reviewed policies libraries and other cultural heritage institutions have posted online, identified categories of topics covered, and developed an outline of those. Following that, we worked as a group to create a template that includes sample texts taken from the policies and added sample text to fill in gaps.

In addition to that focused work, meetings were used for round robin updates, and questions from attendees. The networking aspect of meetings is useful in sharing Covid protocols from different institutions, as well as modifications made to workflows. Also, questions and subsequent discussions provided continuing education as we heard how different organizations handle their work. The mix of new and more experienced members from a variety of institutions provided for a rich experience.

Working Groups

NDSA Working groups were once again busy this year with work being conducted by the Digipres Conference Organizing Committee and Excellence Awards Committee, the Fixity Survey Working Group, the publishing of the Good Migrations Checklist, additional translations of the Levels of Digital Preservation, a Membership Task Force Survey and Report, the Staffing Survey Working Group, and the formation of the Web Archiving Working Group. Highlights of the work of these groups can be found below:

DigiPres Conference Organizing Committee

The 2021 DigiPres conference was hosted virtually on Thursday, November 4th 2021 – on World Digital Preservation Day! Since 2016, the conference has been held in conjunction with DLF Forum and Learn@DLF, but this was the second year our community convened online, paving the way for record numbers of proposal submissions and registrants. A recap of the event, including links to the proceedings, can be found on the DigiPres 2021 NDSA web page. Session recordings will be out shortly.
Recordings from the 2020 conference were made available in early 2021

NDSA Excellence Awards Committee

In 2021 the awards were renamed as the Excellence Awards to 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. Awards focus on recognizing excellence in the following areas: Individual Award, Project Award, Sustainability Award, Organization Award, Future Steward Award and the Educator Award. Information about the awards and current and past winners is available on the NDSA website.

Fixity Survey

The NDSA Fixity Survey originally run in 2017 was rerun in 2021. A call for participation went out in March, the survey was available to the public in May, and the survey results were published in November. The Fixity Survey is expected to be completed every four years.

Good Migrations Checklist Published

The Good Migrations Checklist provides a checklist for what you will want to do or think through before and after moving digital materials and metadata forward to a new digital preservation system/infrastructure. The checklist also uses the technical framework of the functional areas of the Levels of Digital Preservation.

Levels of Digital Preservation

There were three new translations (Arabic, Finnish, and German) done for the Levels of DIgital Preservation in the past year, bringing the total number of languages the matrix and other Levels documents are translated to seven.
The Levels Steering group also assisted the Teaching Advocacy and Outreach subgroup in publishing a set of teaching materials about the Levels.

Membership Task Force

NDSA Leadership initiated a Membership Task force in early 2021 in order to learn more about how members felt about their membership and what they may be expecting or interested in for the future. A call for participation was made in February and the report based on the survey responses was published in December.

Staffing Survey

The NDSA Staffing Survey was run in 2013 and 2017. A call for participation in the next iteration was made in March of 2021. The Staffing Survey working group spent much of the year discussing and revising the survey questions and goals, before releasing the survey for responses in November. In the past, the survey requested only one response per organization. This time, in order to get a wider set of responses and a new view of staffing situations, any individual could answer the survey and multiple people from the same organization could participate. The survey has been closed and the group will be analyzing the results in early 2022.

Web Archiving Survey

Upon the NDSA Leaderships review of surveys as a whole, the Web Archiving survey was also due for the next iteration in 2021. A request for participation in this group was sent out in October and the group has formed and has begun working on the survey. Please keep your eyes out for the survey in 2022.

Thank you!

Thank you to all of our members for taking time to participate in the many surveys and activities over the years. We appreciate the time spent and look forward to continuing to work together.

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

Announcing Member Contact Update Form and Update on Membership Status

NDSA membership contacts are the main point of contact if questions arise about the NDSA membership. These people also receive emails about the annual Coordinating Committee election and any other official correspondence the NDSA Leadership may have. To help keep these contacts up to date, the NDSA has been working on developing a way for organizations to let us know when their Program Representative or Authorized Signatory contact needs to be updated. We have developed a form for you to fill out to provide us with correct information.

To assist NDSA with managing memberships, emails from contacts that bounce back more than once from organizations with multiple contacts will be automatically removed from the membership contact list. Effort will be made to reach out to organizations without multiple contacts that have emails bouncing back, however if no response is received NDSA reserves the right to remove this organization from the current membership list until such time as the organization is able to provide new contacts.

If you would like to know who your contacts are please reach out to ndsa.digipres [at] gmail.com and we will be happy to provide you with that information.

This information, instructions, and the form are also available on the Member Orientation webpage. There is also a link to the form on the Join the NDSA webpage.

~ The NDSA Leadership Team