Category: NDSA

Registration is Now Open for CLIR’s 2023 Events, Learn@DLF Program Available, Keynotes Announced

The Council on Library and Information Resources is delighted to announce that we have opened registration for our in-person conferences happening in St. Louis, Missouri, this November: the Digital Library Federation’s (DLF) Forum, Learn@DLF, and NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2023.

Our events will take place on the following dates:

The program for Learn@DLF, which features 10 exciting workshops, is also now available.

We’re also very excited to announce the featured speakers for all of our events:

  • Kishonna Gray will present “Archiving Cultures: Gaming as Black Digital Storytelling” at the DLF Forum
  • Jamie A. Lee will present “Kairotic and Kin-centric Archives: Addressing Abundances and Abandonments” at DigiPres


Secure the early bird rate, register for Learn@DLF workshops, book your hotel, and start planning for yet another memorable week with CLIR. 

DLF member organizations receive one complimentary DLF Forum registration as part of their member benefits. Not sure who received your code? Email us at forum@diglib.org. 

Learn more about our events and keynotes on the DLF Forum Blog.

Register Today

If you have any questions, please write to us at forum@diglib.org. We’re looking forward to seeing you in St. Louis this fall.

-Team DLF

P.S. Want to stay updated on all things #DLFforum? Subscribe to our Forum newsletter and follow us at @CLIRDLF on Twitter.

 

Learn@DLF: Nov. 12, 2023; 2023 DLF Forum: Nov. 13-15, 2023; NDSA Digital Preservation: Nov. 15-16, 2023. St Louis!

Now Accepting Nominations for the NDSA 2023 Excellence Awards

Nominations are now being accepted for the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) 2023 Excellence Awards!

The biennial NDSA Excellence Awards (previously the annual Innovation Awards) were established to recognize and encourage exemplary achievement in the field of digital preservation stewardship at a level of national or international importance. Seeking to highlight and commend all forms of creative and meaningful contributions in the field of digital preservation, this working group accepts nominations for individuals, educators, future stewards, organizations, projects, and sustainability activities categories. Acknowledging that exemplary digital stewardship can take many forms, eligibility for these awards has been left purposely broad. Anyone, any institution, or any project acting in the context of the categories listed below can be nominated for an award. No NDSA membership or affiliation is required. Self-nomination is accepted and encouraged, as are submissions reflecting the needs and accomplishments of historically marginalized and underrepresented communities.

Awards categories are:

  • Individual Award: Recognizing those individuals making a significant contribution to the digital preservation community through advances in theory or practice.
  • Educator Award: Recognizing academics, trainers, and curricular endeavors promoting effective and inventive approaches to digital preservation education through academic programs, partnerships, professional development opportunities, and curriculum development.
  • Future Steward Award: Recognizing students and early-career professionals making an impact on advancing knowledge and practice of digital preservation stewardship.
  • Organization Award: Recognizing those organizations providing support, guidance, advocacy, or leadership for the digital preservation community.
  • Project Award: Recognizing those activities whose goals or outcomes make a significant contribution or strategic or conceptual understanding necessary for successful digital preservation stewardship.
  • Sustainability Award: Recognizing those activities whose goals or outcomes make a significant contribution to operational trustworthiness, monitoring, maintenance, or intervention necessary for sustainable digital preservation stewardship.

The NDSA is an organization consisting of a diverse international membership sharing a commitment to digital preservation. The development and support of a broad range of successful digital preservation activities is key to the future of digital stewardship. We encourage all members of the international digital preservation community to help us highlight and reward distinctive approaches to the challenges of digital preservation by submitting nominations for worthy candidates here: 2023 NDSA Excellence Awards Nominations. 

Nominations will be accepted until Friday, August 4, 2023.

Awards will be presented on November 15th as part of the Opening Plenary session at the 2023 NDSA Digital Preservation conference in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

Attendance at the conference is encouraged but not required for awardees or nominators.

Information and details on awards from previous years is available on the Excellence Awards webpage.

DigiPres 2023 Keynote Speaker: Dr. Jamie Lee!

We are pleased to announce Dr. Jamie Lee as the keynote speaker for Digital Preservation 2023: Communities of Time and Place (#DigiPres23). Dr. Lee is an Associate Professor of Digital Culture, Information, and Society at the School of Information, University of Arizona, and is a scholar, activist, filmmaker, archivist, oral historian, partner, co-parent, neighbor, and friend. They founded and direct the Arizona Queer Archives (www.arizonaqueerarchives.com) where they train community members on facilitating oral history interviews and building collections in and with their own families and communities. With storytelling at the heart of their life’s work, Lee also directs the Digital Storytelling & Oral History Lab and co-founded the Critical Archives and Curation Collaborative, the co/lab, through which they collaborate on such storytelling projects as secrets of the agave: a Climate Justice Storytelling Project (www.secretsoftheagave.com), the Climate Alliance Mapping Project, CAMP (www.climatealliancemap.org), and the Stories of Arizona’s Tribal Libraries Oral History Project (with Dr. Sandy Littletree and Knowledge River). Lee’s 2021 research monograph, Producing the Archival Body, engages storytelling to re-consider how archives are defined, understood, deployed, and accessed to produce subjects. Arguing that archives and bodies are mutually constitutive and developing a keen focus on the body and embodiment alongside archival theory, Lee introduces new understandings of archival bodies that interrogate how power circulates in archival contexts in order to build critical understandings of how deeply archives shape the production of knowledges and human subjectivities. For more on Lee’s projects, visit www.thestorytellinglab.io. In their keynote talk,“​​Kairotic and Kin-centric Archives: Addressing Abundances and Abandonments,” Dr. Lee traverses the persistent memories and memory-making practices of their local queer borderlands communities through frameworks of the kairotic and kin-centric. Sharing stories from two distinct community-based digital archiving projects, Lee attends to loss and to re-collection and explicitly addresses both abundances and abandonments.

More information on Dr. Lee’s keynote talk will be shared when the DigiPres program schedule is released soon! 

 

NDSA Welcomes Three New Members this First Quarter of 2023

As of March 2023, the NDSA Leadership unanimously voted to welcome its three 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 all members, you can see them here.

James Madison University

James Madison University Libraries is formally building out their digital preservation program and working closely with AV materials from our Special Collections. They also recognize the pressing need to more strategically engage with web archiving, to capture more fully the complete context of the creative and scholarly activities from our communities. They are developing integrations between their preservation system and their discovery and description systems, and look forward to being part of NDSA to more comprehensively engage with the wider community on these points. 

Namibia University of Science and Technology

The Namibia University of Science and Technology Library Digital Collections is responsible for the acquisition, arrangement, description, indexing, storage, disposal, and dissemination of NUST’s historically valuable institutional documents such as study programmes, past exam papers, annual reports, VHS tapes that have been converted to mp4 videos, audio and images taken during NUST events. Through joining the NDSA, they plan to benchmark and explore more ways to ensure long-term preservation and access for this valuable content. 

Syracuse University Libraries

While Syracuse University Libraries has been committed to confronting the implications, challenges, and rewards of digital preservation for many years, they have more recently formalized this commitment. In 2021, they established a new Department of Digital Stewardship, which signals both their commitment to digital stewardship in all its forms, providing support to digital scholarship by centering activities of digital production, provision of access, description, object management, and digital preservation. This new department also provides an organizational framework and locus for this activity at Syracuse University Libraries. By joining NDSA, Syracuse University Libraries furthers its commitment and capacity to this work.

NDSA Levels Office Hour April 19th: How do you use the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation?

The NDSA Levels of Preservation Steering Group is interested in finding out how you use the Levels. This information will help others who are using the Levels and may also inform future work.

We hope to gather real life activities from a range of different organizations using the Levels, answering specific questions and scenarios of interest to the community. In March, we released this Google form to start gathering your feedback. Now, we are keeping the conversation going via a live community chat at our next Levels open office hour.

What is your process for using the Levels? How granularly do you use them? How do the Levels fit in with your other certification/assessment work? Do financial or environmental considerations come into your work or processes?

Please join us on April 19th at 11:30am EST to discuss. We welcome all contributions no matter how big or small!

We look forward to seeing you!

(More details and joining instructions can be found here).

~ The Levels of Preservation Steering Group

How do you use the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation?

The NDSA Levels of Preservation Steering group would like to find out more about particular scenarios in which the Levels are being used. This information will help others who are using the Levels and may also inform future work. Rather than looking for full and detailed case studies, we hope to gather real life activities from a range of different organizations using the Levels answering specific questions and scenarios of interest to the community. 

We are interested in the following questions:

  • How you routinely use the NDSA Levels? – Is it on a regular schedule? Who does it? Who is the information communicated to? What documentation is maintained?
  • At what level of granularly you use the NDSA Levels? – Do you do just one assessment for all your holdings, or do you do it multiple times for different departments of types of content?
  • How does the NDSA Levels fit in with the bigger picture of certification and maturity modeling for your organization? – Do you use the Levels alongside other certification standards, maturity models or self-assessment tools? What else do you use and how do these different tools work together to help you move forward?
  • Are the NDSA Levels used to help project the financial cost of digital preservation? – Do you do this at the level of individual objects, by collection or for the entire repository? How is this information generated? How is it used in program planning? Who contributes to this exercise?
  • Are environmental considerations are taken into account in your digital preservation work? – How does this impact your use of the Levels?

We welcome contributions no matter how big or small. You are welcome to respond to just one of the scenarios or answer any of the questions that are relevant to you. If multiple scenarios apply to you or your organization, feel free to fill out the form multiple times addressing one question at a time if that is easier.  

The information shared with us will be collated and published in a series of themed blog posts. If you wish your contribution to be published anonymously that is fine too!

Please contribute your answers in the Google form by May 1, 2023.

If you would prefer to share your thoughts on any of these questions in a community chat session, we will be hosting our next Levels Office Hour session on this topic on 19th April at 11:30 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada) so do drop in and share your thoughts (more details and joining instructions can be found here).

We very much look forward to hearing from you!

~ The Levels of Preservation Steering Group

Reminder: Call for New Members and Co-Chairs, NDSA Excellence Awards Working Group

The NDSA Excellence Awards Working Group (EAWG) seeks new co-chairs and at-large members! This group relies on volunteer participation from the digital preservation community to publicize the nomination process, review nominations, select the winners, and work closely with the awardees and the DigiPres conference program committee to organize the Awards Ceremony. The group typically meets once a month and works as needed in between regularly scheduled calls to support the awards process. Most work outside of meetings occurs when reviewing applications (2-4 hours), and then in October leading up to the Awards Ceremony (1-2 hours/week). We welcome participation from students and early career professionals, as well as from those who have been in the digital preservation field for a while!

The NDSA Excellence Awards were established in 2012 to highlight and commend all forms of creative and meaningful contributions by individual professionals, future stewards, educators, organizations, projects, and sustainability activities to the field of digital preservation. They offer a wonderful opportunity to learn about the activities and impact of a wide range of exceptional people and projects. Recently, a cooperative agreement was reached with the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) allowing the awards programs for both groups to be presented on an interleaved biennial basis. The NDSA Awards are presented in the odd-numbered years (including this year at DigiPres 2023, in St. Louis on November 15-16, 2023!), while the DPC program takes place in even-numbered years. This provides an opportunity to work with digital preservationists from around the world as a judge on the DPC Digital Preservation Awards in 2024. 

Please consider contributing important professional service back to the digital stewardship community.  If you would like to join the EAWG, please fill out this form and provide a brief statement of interest. Working group members must be affiliated with an NDSA member institution and agree to follow the NDSA Code of Conduct.

NDSA Digital Preservation Conference (DigiPres23) Call for Proposals

The NDSA is pleased to announce that the Call for Proposals (CFP) is now open for Digital Preservation 2023: Communities of Time and Place (#DigiPres23) to be held November 15-16, 2023 in person in St. Louis, Missouri at the St. Louis Union Station Hotel.

Submissions from members and nonmembers alike are welcome, and you can learn more about session format options through the CFP.  The deadline to submit proposals is May 1, 2023 at 11:59 pm Eastern Time.  Learn more about the conference itself on the Digital Preservation conference website.

 

View the CFP and Submit 

 

Digital Preservation 2023 (#DigiPres23) is held in partnership with NDSA’s host organization, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) who is sponsoring a series of events including the 2023 DLF Forum (November 13-15) and associated workshop series Learn@DLF (November 12).  CLIR, DLF, and NDSA strive to create a safe, accessible, welcoming, and inclusive event, and adheres to DLF’s Code of Conduct.

We look forward to seeing you at DigiPres23! 

 

~ 2023 DigiPres Planning Committee

 

Calls For Proposals For 2023 CLIR Events Are Now Live

Learn@DLF: Nov. 12, 2023; 2023 DLF Forum: Nov. 13-15, 2023; NDSA Digital Preservation: Nov. 15-16, 2023. St Louis!

 

The Council on Library and Information Resources is pleased to announce that we have opened Calls for Proposals for our conferences happening in person in St. Louis, MO this November: the Digital Library Federation’s (DLF) Forum and Learn@DLF and NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2023: Communities of Time and Place.

For all events, we encourage proposals from members and non-members; regulars and newcomers; digital library practitioners from all sectors (higher education, museums and cultural heritage, public libraries, archives, etc.) and those in adjacent fields such as institutional research and educational technology; and students, early- and mid-career professionals and senior staff alike. We especially welcome proposals from individuals who bring diverse professional and life experiences to the conference, including those from underrepresented or historically excluded racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds, immigrants, veterans, those with disabilities, and people of all sexual orientations or gender identities.

Our events will take place in person on the following dates:


The deadline for all opportunities is Monday, May 1, at 11:59pm Eastern Time.


View the Calls for Proposals and submit:

Submit for one conference or multiple (though, different proposals for each, please).

Please note: All sessions for the 2023 DLF Forum, Learn@DLF, and NDSA’s Digital Preservation will take place in person.

If you have any questions, please write to us at forum@diglib.org. We’re looking forward to seeing you in St. Louis this fall.

-Team DLF

P.S. Want to stay updated on all things #DLFforum? Subscribe to our Forum newsletter and follow us at @CLIRDLF on Twitter.

Join us for NDSA Membership Listening Forums

We want to hear from you — whether you’re an NDSA member or not — about your experiences with the NDSA. The NDSA Membership Working Group invites you to attend one of the two listening forums on March 8th at 10am EST/9am CST/7am PST and March 22nd at 2pm EST/1pm CST/11am PST.

Following our 2021 survey, part of the Membership Working Group’s charge has been to gather more data on your thoughts on types of memberships, moving to a paid membership model, and how NDSA could improve membership experiences. Your comments are crucial to our work moving forward and improving the NDSA membership experience.

Please register for March 8th here.

Please register for March 22nd here.

If you cannot make either session, please feel free to write your thoughts on the jamboard using the sticky note feature.

~ The NDSA Membership Working Group

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