NDSA Blog

The AIMS Project (An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship) won a 2012 Innovation Award in the Project category. AIMS participants were recognized for their work developing a framework for stewarding born-digital content and filling the gap between applying standards such as OAIS and the necessary workflows and tools for implementation. The responses to this Q&A were provided by AIMS Project participants from Stanford University, University of Hull, and University of Virginia.

What have you/project teams been doing since receiving an NDSA Innovation Award?

Stanford: Made the digital archivist position continuing (aka “real”), 2+ years ago we added another full-time digital archivist. DLSS & Special Collections collaborated to build our capacity and procedures for acquiring and processing and delivering b-d materials. Received 3 grants to develop our open-source email processing/delivery platform (ePADD project, discovery online). This last has morphed into a new grant application by Harvard & the Univ. of Manchester (w/ us as consultants) to further develop ePADD with more preservation elements.

• Total born-digital collections acquired since 2012: ~140 accessions and ~250 TB. Born-digital processing projects (processed and in progress) include: Amos Gitai, Dorothy Fadiman, Helen & Newton Harrison, Ted Nelson, New Dimensions, Silicon Genesis, Ruth Asawa, Lourdes Portillo. Other collection acquisition highlights (unprocessed) include: Rebecca Solnit, Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Marlon Riggs, Bob Stein, David Bohrman.
• Through the born-digital program, Stanford and Virginia are members of the Software Preservation Network and both nodes for the Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) project
• Stanford DLSS and Special Collections has also worked together with a number of other institutions, including University of Michigan, Duke University, Indiana University, and Princeton University to develop ArcLight, an open source discovery and delivery environment for archives.
• After Yale, Mark Matienzo served as the Director of Technology for the Digital Public Library of America, and joined Stanford in 2016.

Virginia: We have also made digital preservation and management a priority by making the AIMS position permanent.  We have been fortunate to have both digital archivists and a digital preservation librarian as full time positions.

• Virginia incubated and created the Academic Preservation Trust. APTrust has over 150 TB of content and is growing all the time.

Hull: Simon Wilson retained responsibility for born-digital archives when he returned to his substantive role as Senior Archivist. Hull retained a high profile across the UK with lots of advocacy for encouraging organisations to take practical steps with digital preservation and proposed that digital archives could be undertaken as a shared-service between multiple archive services.

• The project gave us a huge boost of confidence with increased advocacy within the institution and lead to the inclusion of born-digital archives as key activity for the library service
• Colleagues from Hull collaborated with the University of York in a project funded by JISC to look at the suitability of Archivematica to support research data management activity – an opportunity to review and identify similarities and differences between research data and born-digital archives
• Advocated and secured funding from a range of sources including The National Archives to create an archive for Hull UK City of Culture 2017

What did receiving the NDSA Innovation award in 2012 for AIMS mean to you and/or the project team?

Recognition of work that was critical to the basic operations within archives then and now. This was an international group that came together, identified significant challenges, and developed strategies to address them.

The Award also helped introduce and integrate our work into the larger preservation community. Since 2012, Virginia, for example, has been very active in the NDSA with two staff being elected as Coordinating Committee Chairs and several others being chairs of Interest and Working Groups.

The encouragement of working with others for mutual benefit – a legacy that has remained central to our philosophy. Simon Wilson served on the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Partnership and Sustainability Sub-committee (2016-2019) and contributed to the international curatorial team reviewing NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation

What efforts, advances, or ideas over the last 5-8 years have caught your attention or interest in the area of digital stewardship?

There are too many to note but the rise of Distributed Digital Preservation Services has made significant advances to help many organizations understand and implement digital preservation in a cost effective manner. Software preservation and emulation have also risen to the fore based on much of the scholarly foundations of folks like those at MITH. With the rise of cloud services, emulated environments are now much more standardized than they were in the AIMS years.

The AIMS project was a significant collaborative and technical endeavor. What components of the project do you think have sustained or grown in the digital stewardship community over time? What ideas or work from the project had you hoped would gain traction in the community, but did not quite catch on?

We still live in hope of an integrated hierarchical collections discovery platform and UI. Entities like the DPLA, though one of the largest digital portals in the world, still lack the means to represent hierarchical collections. Much of our archival materials (including born digital) are difficult to discover and access.

What are some priorities or challenges you see for digital stewardship?

Better integration of new technologies such as augmented reality (which includes artificial intelligence and machine learning). There is too much data being produced for humans to manage themselves.

Metadata is still largely siloed by organization and efforts to integrate and iterate metadata is still a major challenge for the library and archives professions.

Digital preservation is still a major challenge for any organization that manages digital content. Much of the funding still comes from collections budgets and a shift to consider preservation akin to infrastructure (like electricity) is the only way we will be able to scale to meet the challenge of preserving the cultural record.

Hull’s experience has been very dependent on project funding and this has seen phases of activity / in-activity which has demonstrated the need for dedicated resource to transition into a service which can be maintained though for the long term it should be considered part of business as usual with all members of the team contributing to this strand of activity.

The Mid-Michigan Digital Practitioners (MMDP) won a 2016 Innovation Award in the Organization category. MMDP was recognized for taking an innovative approach to providing support and guidance to the digital preservation community. The responses to this Q&A were provided by Rick Adler, Ed Busch, and Bryan Whitledge.

What have you/the project team been doing since receiving an NDSA Innovation Award?

Since receiving the award, we have continued to do what we do best – connecting archivists, librarians, curators, historians, digital humanities experts, and other kindred professionals and students across Michigan. Cultural heritage workers have a disposition to share knowledge with others. MMDP is all about sharing knowledge and our constituency is other cultural heritage workers. We connect via our semi-annual meetings (which, thanks to support from the Library of Michigan, and other institutions, have remained free for attendees) and through our listserv list.

In light of the public health emergency, we didn’t hold a spring meeting, but we did hold some virtual check-ins to connect with the MMDP community and share experiences about working from home, dealing with job cuts at our institutions, or returning to the physical workspace. We are looking forward to a fully virtual fall meeting – we think that the Mid-Michigan Digital Practitioners should be able to pull off a great virtual meeting!

One effort we undertook a few years ago was to create a directory of experts. Conferences and meetings are great, and so is a listserv list, but sometimes it is nice for one person to connect with another to speak in-depth about a specific topic. The directory is a list of MMDP members who are willing to share their expertise in different skills and tools with other MMDP members on a one-on-one basis. If someone is looking for someone with policy-writing skills, we’ve got that. If another person needs some help with StoryMapJS, we’ve got that, too. And if another MMDP member needs some help cataloging Cherokee-language materials, there is an expert who can help with that!

We also have an MMDP member who led a pilot grant in Michigan to explore the creation of a statewide digital preservation network. While the MMDP wasn’t part of the grant, we definitely contributed to getting the word out across the state. MMDP members have been at the table every step of the way. The project is now moving to the next phase in creating a digital preservation network and the MMDP is one venue for sharing information about the project with the people most likely to work with it.

What did receiving the NDSA Innovation award in 2016 for MMDP mean to you and/or the project team?

Back when we started, we were an experiment… and it worked. So, the recognition was very meaningful. The award definitely raised our profile outside of Michigan. Hopefully, we have inspired other digital practitioners from around the country to form similar groups. For us, in terms of our Michigan constituency, it reinforced our conviction that what we are doing is valuable and needs to be sustained. Many of our more recent members might not know about the NDSA Innovation award, but the commitment, effort, and spirit that led NDSA to bestow the award upon us are still present in everything we strive to do for our community.

What efforts, advances, or ideas over the last 5-8 years have caught your attention or interest in the area of digital stewardship?

Lowering the barriers to entry—across the board—for digital culture. The barriers are numerous and they aren’t solely financial. The network we mentioned a moment ago is an example of that. Here in Michigan, we have some world-class institutions and they can create homegrown digital preservation environments that are second-to-none. But we also have many small historical societies with historical collections that are just as important, yet they don’t have the tools, the staff, or the finances to allow them to join a major digital-preservation endeavor. MMDP members can help to make digital preservation accessible to institutions of all stripes in Michigan. Our members have varying levels of knowhow about a wide range of digital stewardship topics (advocacy, governance, technical infrastructure skills, developing training materials, etc.), and encouraging them to share what they know expands the potential of cultural heritage professionals around Michigan. Also, we can lean on the technological tools and skills at those institutions that support the network to make the essential technology of digital preservation accessible to all at a relatively low cost. Hopefully, through a project like this, every library, archives, museum, and historical society in the state can jump in and join the digital preservation effort. And we can get all of those historic photos off of old flash drives!

Another set of barriers that we hope to do away with are the limits to access that surround much of our digital cultural content. We are inspired by all of the various digital efforts across the state and the country. But there are so many fantastic resources that are buried behind paywalls and even more fantastic resources that don’t see the light of day because of the costs associated with making them available. One of our members works with cultural institutions all across the state to help them share their collection metadata through the Digital Public Library of America and a new state portal called Michigan Memories. But that isn’t enough. We also need to find resources for institutions with fantastic content but no means to host it, and help them preserve it or make it accessible with low-cost or free tools. It includes developing K-12 lesson plans and curricula supported by the freely available primary sources—we know how great this content is, but we also have to be aware that many of our target audiences are swamped with information and they might not have time to wade through hundreds of primary sources across several different platforms to develop a the perfect lesson. If we can help with that, students across the state benefit.

The MMDP project provides a great example of a regional collective that represents a wide range of libraries, archives, and museums. What successes or challenges have emerged over the now 7 years of this project?

As with any endeavor, especially one operated solely by volunteers, it can be difficult to sustain. But we have been fortunate to keep this going with new volunteers who rotate on and off our planning team as they have time. Our leadership and governance is truly 100% flexible. This means that our planning team varies in size and composition all the time. We have had planning team members tell us that their other responsibilities in life have picked up, so they have to take a break from MMDP. One year later, they are back on the planning team conference calls and recruiting speakers for our next workshop.

Overall, one of the major successes has been the low-risk opportunity for leadership afforded to our members. Becoming a member of the planning team is as simple as saying, “I would like to help.” From there, the responsibilities are divvied up as needed. When we say “low-risk,” it doesn’t necessarily mean easy or not important. Putting together a conference for 80+ attendees is no simple feat. But we have such a great group and the low-pressure nature of the MMDP really allows a new leader to learn the ins and outs without fear of failure. And, of course, the veteran MMDP members are always available as a safety net to help out as needed. Dozens of cultural heritage workers in Michigan can include a stint with MMDP’s planning team as part of their leadership experience.

We have had another success in that our efforts have been recognized by the Library of Michigan and a few of the professional organizations in Michigan for librarians, archivists, and museum professionals. We have been offered space in the Library of Michigan’s facilities to host our conferences, and we have been able to partner with other professional organizations to host a one-day workshop or a panel on digital stewardship in their conferences. It is great that other organizations and institutions in Michigan recognize that we are a special group and they support us—it allows us to keep serving anyone in Michigan looking for more information about anything and everything related to digital stewardship. 

What are some priorities or challenges you see for digital stewardship?

2020 has definitely brought about many challenges in all aspects of life. Because of the current public health emergency, the resulting budget cuts, and calls for meaningful change in policies related to equity and inclusion, the priorities for digital stewardship will have to change, too. Digital cultural heritage seemed to many people like a nice “extra” thing in their lives. With remote learning, we saw how digital cultural heritage immediately became a necessity for students. And it became a comfort for people looking for a moment of peace—they could explore a museum’s holdings through a public-facing DAM or do some genealogy using digital newspapers. We also need to take stock of the work we are doing and how it can best serve all of our communities, which may mean reorienting some of the priorities we defined before March of 2020.

In light of the seismic upheavals on many fronts, MMDP foresees tough times in trying to execute our priority of continuing to facilitate the sharing of digital stewardship information among our members. With tightening budgets on the horizon and more demands for digital cultural heritage, our members need to be able to get the most out of the limited time and funds that we have. There are so many new tools, new initiatives, and new skills—every one of us could spend a lifetime learning about them (and spend a ton of money in the process). By sharing some information and offering advice like “try this, and avoid that,” we hopefully can save people a lot of time, effort, and money to accomplish their digital stewardship goals.

Another priority will be to continue to lower the barriers to entry to digital stewardship. Michigan is a big state with a wide variety of needs in that realm. MMDP is one helpful piece in a larger puzzle of knowledge-sharing and collaboration that will be needed to ensure that Michigan’s cultural heritage is preserved and made accessible to the people who could use it.

Nominations are now being accepted for the NDSA 2020 Innovation Awards.

Martin Gengenbach won a 2013 Innovation Award in the Future Steward category. Martin was recognized for his work documenting digital forensics tools and workflows, especially his paper, “The Way We Do it Here: Mapping Digital Forensics Workflows in Collecting Institutions” and his work cataloging the DFXML schema. He is currently the Lead, Preservation at Gates Archive.

What have you been doing since receiving an NDSA Innovation Award?

When I received the 2013 NDSA Innovation Award for Future Steward, I had just accepted a position at Gates Archive in Seattle, WA, and I am still there! Gates Archive is the trusted custodian for the personal and philanthropic collections of the Gates Family. In my current role as Lead, Preservation, I oversee physical and digital preservation activities at the archive. I also teach courses in Digital Forensics for the SAA Digital Archives Specialist Certification. The DAS courses (both Fundamentals and Advanced) have been an important way for me to continue to grow in my understanding about digital forensics for archives and special collections and engage with practitioners across the country. 

On a more personal note, my most recent activity has been to take some family leave time to care for my 6-month old son, Henry.

What did receiving the NDSA Award mean to you?

I felt so honored to receive the NDSA Innovation Award! As a newbie archivist and recipient of the “Future Steward” award, this recognition provided a major boost to my professional confidence, and helped me to manage the imposter syndrome that we all feel, particularly as a new member of the profession. Also, by attending the Digital Preservation conference I met so many other scholars and practitioners in the field who I have stayed in touch with, both as colleagues and as friends. Many of the people and projects that I first encountered through the Digital Preservation conference are still important resources in my everyday professional life.

What efforts, advances, or ideas over the last few years have you been impressed with or admired in the area of digital stewardship?

One finding I noted in my research on digital forensics workflows in 2012 was the limited examples of documentation for processing or providing access to born digital content. Thankfully this is no longer the case, and I’m really impressed by the proliferation of born-digital arrangement and description guidelines that are now available online. I’m particularly excited about the recently released version 4 of the Guidelines for Efficient Archival Processing in the University of California Libraries, as previous versions were really helpful in developing my views on digital processing as part of a broader processing program. I’ve also been following the DLF Born Digital Access Group, and the work they have been doing to push digital stewards to think more critically about policies and practices around access to digital holdings. These resources are great for the digital stewardship community, as they provide examples for organizations that may have mature processes for acquiring and preserving digital content but are still working on developing ways to process that content, and what those processing decisions mean when it comes to providing access to users.

Digital and analog preservation are often kept very separate organizationally; there is “preservation” and then there is “digital preservation.” Has your current position changed your thinking about (digital) preservation?

Most organizations have had to incorporate digital preservation into existing systems and workflows as they began to receive digital content over time. Gates Archive is a relatively new archive and we have had the opportunity to build an organization from day one with the assumption that collecting and delivering digital content will be central to our business; we have the benefit of not having to “fit digital into” any existing structures. In practice, the result is that all archive staff are comfortable and capable working with physical or digital materials, and digital expertise is distributed. It makes all of our work better to be able to have additional inputs into a developing process or policy, and there is no “that’s not my job.” We are all invested in developing a successful digital preservation program.

For me, this integrated model has been further highlighted by research I presented at the Digital Preservation conference in 2014. In a follow-up to the work for which I was recognized, I went back to each of the institutions and discovered many digital forensics workflows that were operational in 2012 had paused or halted work due to employee turnover. This reinforced the need for a comprehensive approach to cultural heritage stewardship that integrates digital and physical workflows to ensure that stewardship is not limited by individual technical skills and expertise. I’ve got the recent article, “What’s Wrong With Digital Stewardship: Evaluating the Organization of Digital Preservation Programs from Practitioners’ Perspectives” at the top of my to-read list, and I’m excited to see what that group of authors has to say.

Nominations are now being accepted for the NDSA 2020 Innovation Awards.

Samantha Abrams won a 2016 Innovation Award in the Future Steward category. Samantha was recognized for her work with the Madison Public Library and its Personal Archiving Lab as well as her initiative to create innovative projects and classes. She is currently the Web Resources Collection Librarian for the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation.

What have you been doing since receiving an NDSA Innovation Award?

Since May 2017, I’ve been the Web Resources Collection Librarian (read: Web Archivist) for the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, based at Columbia University. (When I received the award, I was the Community Archivist at StoryCorps.) In support of the Confederation, I manage the Web Collecting Program, a collaborative collection development effort to build curated, thematic collections of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research at participating Libraries and beyond. Right now, we have 21 public collections on topics ranging from elections, to webcomics, to video games, to vaccination, and just about everything in between. We’re also working on a Coronavirus collection that will document social responses to the virus — music videos, art, writing, and more — in countries all over the world.

I’ve also been teaching Introduction to Web Archiving at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s iSchool — one course for Master’s students, and one for Continuing Education students. I’ve engineered the course to be an overview of web archiving concepts: students pick a theme around which to collect, write a collection policy, use Archive-It, Conifer, and Perma.cc to crawl identified websites, and then, at the end of the course, make the case — or not! — for web archiving at their institution. It’s been a lot of fun!

What did receiving the NDSA Award mean to you?

I received the Future Steward award in 2016, right before I graduated with my Master’s degree in Library and Information Studies, which felt like a huge vote of confidence, personally — like I had picked the right path, and that I should keep at it. Receiving the award also motivated me to get more involved with both the National Digital Stewardship Alliance and the Digital Library Federation — I served as a member of the Planning Committee for the DLF Forum in 2019, and as a member of NDSA’s Innovation Working Group (which selects Innovation Award winners) in both 2019 and 2020. Both are excellent organizations with which to work!

What efforts, advances, or ideas over the last few years have you been impressed with or admired in the area of digital stewardship?

I still deeply admire the work of Documenting the Now — after the murder of George Floyd, Documenting the Now launched Archivists Supporting Activists, which connects archivists and memory workers willing to volunteer their time and expertise with with activists interested in documenting their vital work. In the same vein, the Blackivists — ‘a collective of trained Black archivists who prioritize Black cultural heritage preservation and memory work’ — recently released a call to action to ‘ethically and comprehensively archive’ both the Black experience during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the current uprisings brought about by racist police violence against Black people. Both organizations — and others, like Project Stand —  encourage archivists to ethically and carefully engage with the communities they serve and document, and to be deliberate in their work as they collect and attempt to make sense of current events. I also remain deeply inspired by so many of my students — their creativity and willingness to approach web archiving and digital preservation with a careful eye is refreshing, and constantly recenters and reframes my own day-to-day work.

The 2020 NDSA Agenda discusses a number of web and social media archiving challenges, one of them being how labor-intensive much of the work is. How do you make visible your labor? Do you have any tips on advocating for additional resources for web archiving?

Oh, this is such a good question. I’m lucky because my position with the Confederation is full-time — I spend 40 hours per week on web archiving, and nothing else. (I’m also deeply indebted to Jean Park, the Program’s Bibliographic Assistant, who helps with metadata creation, quality assurance, and just about everything in between.) I make sure I’m direct with supervisors and colleagues about how long it will take to make our collections public — I can’t just drop a bunch of sites into Archive-It and make them available to researchers the next day: there’s metadata creation, running crawls, and quality assurance. And it’s quality assurance that takes the longest: I’ve easily spent a few hundred work hours since April performing quality assurance on the Confederation’s forthcoming Coronavirus collection — does this video play? Was this spreadsheet captured? Do the images look like their counterparts on the live site? Our goal, Program-wise, is to view each crawled website at least once before it’s made public — and sometimes that means a site won’t be made public for weeks or months. (I also have my students spend a week on quality assurance, which I know they don’t love — but it prepares them to go back to their own supervisors and directors and really push for the resources — and time — they’ll need to adequately support a fleshed-out web archiving program at their own institutions.)

Is there anything we didn’t ask you that you want to add?

We’re still accepting nominations for the 2020 Innovation Awards! Please help acknowledge and celebrate a new cohort of innovators by submitting worthy nominees — or by nominating yourself — via this form. Nominations are due by Friday, September 4, 2020.

Nominations are now being accepted for the NDSA 2020 Innovation Awards.

Archive Team won a 2013 Innovation Award in the Organization category. Archive Team was recognized for both for its aggressive, vital work in preserving websites and digital content slated for deletion and for its work advocating for the preservation of digital culture within the technology and computing sectors. The answers below were provided by Jason Scott.

What has Archive Team been doing since receiving an NDSA Innovation Award? 

Since receiving the award, Archive Team has gone through a half-dozen generations of volunteers, entering idealistic young eggs and leaving as some sort of burnt-crisp buffalo wings. Our numbers have grown and shrank but generally are high, as people realize how fundamentally fragile and undependable the web continues to be and the need for someone, anyone, to provide a decent mirroring of user data.

We’ve been involved in well over 100 major projects to save websites and especially user-created works over the years, and untold thousands of tiny one-off jobs that our automated mirror service, ArchiveBot, has been sent over to do. On an average day, we generate a terabyte of preserved web content that often ends up at Internet Archive.

At the NDSA event we announced we had modified WGET to support WARC – just this year we have a new version of our use of WGET which has a strong attention to compression, meaning we’re saving a lot of space. For a rag-tag set of maniacs, that’s pretty good.

What did receiving the NDSA Award mean to you?

It mostly let us poke our head into established archivist world, which is a nice world even if we’re not a part of it. Being an activist can make you start to believe you’re the only force in the world, running forward without any need of collaboration or peers. The award gave us contact and awareness that we’re not alone, which made us better and mindful of practices and efforts that were doing items similar to us. We’re still the funniest, though.

What efforts, advances, or ideas over the last few years have you been impressed with or admired in the area of digital stewardship?

The Software Heritage foundation has been tireless in recognizing the important meaning of software and the source code behind it to keep that level of history alive. From a few people advocating to it to companies like github now working to mirror as many repositories as possible in solid data stores is a big deal.

The discovery and rediscovery that history is not only written by the winners, but stored as well; along with this is a greater need to have records of websites and history to prove points and provide evidence, and we’ve been delighted to be part of that.

One of the 2020 NDSA Agenda research priorities is environmental sustainability and sustainability of digital collections. How is Archive Team addressing these issues?

We’re not; we’re too busy saving thousands of URLs that are dying out from underneath us. We haven’t caught a breath in 11 years.

Is there anything we didn’t ask that you want to add? 

Hello, established Archive People! Archive Team is always looking for you to moonlight and join the rough and tumble band of singing dancing chorus line of volunteers we run through like off-brand batteries. Test yourself at https://archiveteam.org.