NDSA Blog

 

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

DataUp from the California Digital Library won a 2013 Innovation Award in the Project category. DataUp was recognized for creating an open-source tool uniquely built to assist individuals aiming to preserve research datasets by guiding them through the digital stewardship workflow process from dataset creation and description to the deposit of their datasets into public repositories. The following individuals are recognized for their contributions to DataUp and subsequent projects, and responses to this Q&A.

The original CDL DataUp team included:

• Stephen Abrams, then CDL Associate Director of the UC Curation Center, currently Head of Digital Preservation, Harvard Library
• Patricia Cruse, then CDL Director of the UC Curation Center, subsequently Executive Director of DataCite, and now retired
• John Kunze, CDL Identifier Systems Architect
• Carly Strasser, then CDL Data Curation Project Manager, currently Program Manager for Open Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Current CDL staff responsible for the successor Dash and Dryad projects are:

• John Chodacki, CDL Director of the UC Curation Center
• Daniella Lowenberg, CDL Research Data Specialist and Product Manager

What has DataUp been doing since receiving an NDSA Innovation Award?

DataUp was conceived by the University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library (CDL) as an immediate response to the needs of researchers for an intuitive, effective, and self-service data curation platform.  DataUp initially targeted support for tabular datasets via an easy-to-use UI accessible to researchers themselves, rather than requiring mediation by librarians or archivists.  At the same time, CDL was engaged in other related initiatives, including the DataShare open data publication system.  Over time, the curatorial intentions and functional capabilities of both systems began to overlap considerably.  Consequently, in 2014 CDL decided to converge the two systems into a common technical platform under the Dash name.  More recently, similar synergies were recognized between Dash and the Dryad research data repository, which led to the integration of the Dash system as the new Dryad technology platform.  Throughout this multi-year evolution, the core principles and goals of the original DataUp project have remained steadfast: providing the best possible support to the scholarly community for the long-term curation, publication, and reuse of critical research data.

What did receiving the NDSA Award mean to you?

Receiving the NDSA Innovation Award was very gratifying as public affirmation by a significant stakeholder community of the value and beneficial impact of the DataUp vision, project, product, and service.  While the DataUp team was convinced of that value right from the start, it is always nice to have those beliefs recognized and confirmed by colleagues and peers.

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

Tremendous strides forward have been made in digital stewardship over the past years.  This has been facilitated in large part by mutual recognition of all implicated stakeholders – scholars, administrators, librarians, archivists, funders – of the nature of common problems and needs and the necessity for coordinated response.  Positive outcomes have followed from the open contribution of their individual perspectives and strengths in collaborative efforts.  For example, the success of the DataUp/DataShare/Dash/Dryad activity called upon the active participation over many years by the CDL, University of California Libraries, the DataONE network, Microsoft Research, the Gordan and Betty Moore Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, DataCite, the Make Data Count initiative, and the Dryad community.  Looking towards the future, there are very promising avenues of exploration regarding the application of big data and machine learning techniques to the proactive curation of research data and other forms and genres of digital content deserving long-term stewardship.

The DataUp project began in 2011 – nearly a decade ago! Various challenges of preserving and providing access to research data sets continue to be discussed, and have been addressed in the 2014, 2015, and 2020 NDSA Agendas for Digital Stewardship. Where do we go from here?

The guiding tenets originally encapsulated by DataUp and its DataShare, Dash, and Dryad successors are fully consistent with the NDSA Agenda’s recommendations for organizing and ensuring long-term access to scientific data sets, including support for at-scale curation, promotion of the FAIR principles, and collaborative attention to innovation and sustainability (https://osf.io/7sfc6/, p. 26).  Three specific concerns seem particularly challenging and call out for concerted attention.  First, the academy as a whole needs to continue development of more flexible and sustainable financial practices concerning the curation of all legitimate research outputs, including research data, to avoid dis-incentivizing and confounding widespread adoption of effective RDM tools and practices.  Second, greater automation and intuitive self-service operation is still needed regarding the contribution of research data to managed curation environments such as Dryad.  Ideally, these actions would be automatic side-effects of other, more primary activities and workflows with which scholars and researchers are already engaged.  And third, more can be done regarding actionable linkages between research publication, research data, and research software, all of which interact within a cohesive and co-dependent web of scholarly activity and communication.  We feel that DataUp provided a pioneering attempt at addressing these issues and look forward to continuing progress towards these important goals.

 

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

Anthony Cocciolo won a 2012 Innovation Award in the Individual category. He was recognized for his innovative approaches to teaching digital preservation practices, in particular his work partnering classes with archival institutions to work on the digitization and digital preservation of analog audio collections. Cocciolo is currently the Dean of the Pratt Institute School of Information.

 

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

In 2012, I was an Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute School of Information.  In 2020, I am still at Pratt, but now I am the Dean of the School.  I still teach the course “Projects in Digital Archives,” where the class is teamed up with a local archive to do digital archives projects, and what I had received the NDSA award for.  You can find this recent article from Pratt about some of the recent work going on in the class, which has included a lot of early LGBTQ+ radio and TV preservation work.

These days I oversee the School of Information, which is the oldest information school in North America, having started training librarians in 1890.  Today the school is based in Manhattan and enrolls about 230 graduate students across several Masters programs.  The pandemic has kept things challenging, as we work to return to campus in the fall, address issues for international students, and work to keep each other healthy and safe.

What did receiving the NDSA Innovation award in 2012 mean to you?

I think it really helped solidify my interests in digital preservation.  I am still very much involved with digital preservation work.  Pratt, in collaboration with NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program (MIAP), has taken over the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) program from Library of Congress in 2018.  Just recently we received a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to restore activity to the project, relaunching it as DPOE Network (DPOE-N), which is exciting.  You can find out more about the project at dpoe.network.

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

I think that audiovisual preservation is finally getting more attention now than it did back in 2012.  I wrote a book back in 2017 called Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists that argued that analog audio and video needed to be digitized, and I am happy to see that idea is viewed as more positively these days.

Overall, I am just happy to see the spread of digital stewardship and the notion that digital materials do not just preserve themselves, and that digital devices are where information of enduring value is largely created.

As the Dean at Pratt Institute School of Information, how has pedagogy grown and/or innovated as it relates to digital stewardship and digital preservation?

I think my pedagogy is largely the same (e.g., having students work on real-world problems in teams), I do try to keep it interesting by changing up the projects.  The past year we were starting to work on repairing open reel tapes with broken splices for digitization when the pandemic hit (the materials we finished are available here). Other times I have had students work on born-digital project with lots of forgotten file formats.  We’ve done projects featuring U.S. Presidents (e.g., digitizing photographs from the New York Times’ “morgue”), early Gay TV programs on U-Matic tape and more.  The variety keeps things interesting.

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

I do think that audiovisual continues to be a challenge and priority. Trying to buy U-Matic VTRs for digitization is getting increasingly difficult.  I think web archiving, while with some exciting newer advancements (like the WebRecorder), still needs more attention and coordinated work.  Digital preservation education is still a needs area, as we do still see examples where archives/special collections have not made the transition to collection born-digital materials.  I am hopeful that the DPOE-N project mentioned earlier will help address this need.

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

Mat Kelly won a 2012 Innovation Award in the Future Steward category when he was a graduate student at Old Dominion University. He won the award in recognition of his work on WARCreate, a Google Chrome extension that allows users to create a Web ARChive (WARC) file from any browsable web page. Kelly is currently an assistant professor in the Information Science department at Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics. 

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

I was a Master’s degree student at Old Dominion University’s Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group when I received the award. The award brought to light in the web archiving community some aspects of preservation that were being neglected due to technical difficulties and the need for more work and research on web archiving. My MS thesis partially entailed the work for which I received the NDSA Innovation Award. After receiving my MS in 2012, I continued onto my PhD with the same group and defended my PhD dissertation, pertaining to the same subject for which I received the award, in 2019. I have since taken a position as a tenure track assistant professor in the Information Science department at Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics. I continue to focus my research of neglected aspects of web archiving that continue to remain a difficult area to explore due to the nature of the medium.

What did receiving the NDSA award mean to you?

The award gave credence that the programmatic work I was doing was worthwhile. The focus of the tool for which I was awarded was not just to create software, but demonstrate the need for simple user interfaces with powerful, standards-based approaches to encourage individuals to be able to archive the part of the web they care about. This helped to seed further research in the area, both for myself as well as others.

What efforts/advances/ideas of the last few years have you been impressed with or admired in the field?

I am in awe at the Webrecorder project, particularly the work of Ilya Kreymer. I appreciate the efforts the organization has done to encourage personal preservation and to do so with with usable software that does not need to rely on a central endpoint or institution for web archiving. Additionally, I have also been impressed with the breadth of the research performed by the other members of the WS-DL research group under the supervision of Drs. Michael L. Nelson and Michele C. Weigle. They have managed students taking interdisciplinary approaches toward neglected but necessary areas of research beyond the computer science area under which they are housed.

What advice do you have for future stewards in the digital preservation field?

The project for which I was awarded did not have an end-goal of attaining notoriety, though it was a pleasant surprise early in my career as a graduate student. It was a passion project to fill a need for those that want to accomplish something but may not have the technical know-how. This is a common occurrence. I would encourage others to further explore the area and exercise the skills for which they have expertise to determine a niche to which they can contribute.

Is there anything else we didn’t ask that you’d like to add?

I am thankful for the NDSA for considering me for the award early in my academic career and for my research group fostering innovation and enabling the opportunity to use what was once a passion project to have greater impact than it would have originally.

As we close in on the end of July we celebrate 10 years of the NDSA!!  

NDSA was initiated by the Library of Congress as a way to sustain and increase partnerships created through the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP).  Participants of NDIIPP were many of the initial members of NDSA.  There were 58 members in 2010, with membership now standing at over 250 in 2020.  Bill LeFurgy, one of the creators of NDSA, discusses the development and history of NDSA as part of NDIIPP, which, incidentally, would have turned 20 in December, and has a report on their first 10 years available as well. 

NDSA started with four groups developed to foster communication and partnerships which has grown in ten years to include three standing Interest groups and at least nine Working groups.  Working groups allow members to focus on specific activities of interest which often produce reports or documentation for the wider community to benefit from.  

In 2016 the Library of Congress passed along the role of Host Institution to the Digital Library Federation (DLF). The DLF has been a good home for the NDSA as well as including DigiPres, the annual NDSA Digital Preservation conference, in their own conference activity planning.   

NDSA is well known for the Agenda for Digital Stewardship and the Levels of Preservation, both with recent updates and publications. NDSA Interest and Working groups have also been busy over the years publishing survey reports (9), case studies (5), and topical interest research pieces (4).  These materials can be found on the NDSA OSF site and the Publications section of the website.  We have taken a renewed approach to strategic planning and transparency to the wider preservation community. We have also expanded significantly into the international scene with new members and partners from across the globe. There is also increased representation at the leadership level, including the elected Coordinating Committee as well as the co-chairs for Interest and Working groups, bringing the Leadership Team to over 20 individuals. 

Moving into the next 10 years, we recognize preservation is a global challenge and as such, we hope to continue expanding our international collaborations and increase our research output and advocacy to help all levels within our preservation community.  NDSA would not exist without you and we want to thank you for 10 amazing years and look forward to approaching the next ten together!

We always welcome new ideas and perspectives, so please feel free to share your thoughts, ideas, and feedback! Email us ndsa.digipres@gmail.com.