Coordinating Committee – Page 2

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

Announcing Incoming NDSA Coordinating Committee Members for 2022-2024

Please join me in welcoming the three newly elected Coordinating Committee members Stacey Erdman, Jen Mitcham, and Hannah Wang. Their terms begin January 1, 2022 and run through December 31, 2024.

Stacey Erdman is the Digital Preservation & Curation Officer at Arizona State University. In this position, she has responsibility for designing and leading the digital preservation and curation program for ASU Library. She is also currently serving as the Acting Digital Repository Manager at ASU, where she has been working with the repository team on migrating repository platforms to Islandora. She is the former Digital Archivist at Beloit College; and Digital Collections Curator at Northern Illinois University. She has been a part of the Digital POWRR Project since its inception in 2012, and is serving as Principal Investigator for the recently funded IMLS initiative, the Digital POWRR Peer Assessment Program. Stacey currently serves on the 2021 NDSA Program Committee, and is also a member of the Membership Task Force. She has been excited to see the steps that the NDSA has taken recently to diversify the member base, and looks forward to working as a part of the CC to help make this work mission-critical. Stacey feels passionately about making the digital preservation field more equitable and inclusive, and would be a strong advocate for expanding NDSA’s outreach, advocacy, and education efforts.

Jen Mitcham is Head of Good Practice and Standards at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), an international membership organization with charitable status based in the UK. In her role at the DPC, Jenny is responsible for promoting and maintaining the DPC’s maturity model for digital preservation, the Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM), and leads a digital preservation project with the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. She has recently led the DPC’s taskforce on EDRMS preservation which has resulted in the publication of an online resource. She is involved in the organization of events and commissioning publications on digital preservation issues and provides support to DPC Members in a variety of different areas. Jenny was previously a digital archivist at the Archaeology Data Service and the University of York and has been working in the field of digital preservation since 2003. She has been involved in several initiatives with the NDSA over the last few years, including the revision of the NDSA Levels of Preservation and the 2021 Fixity Survey.

Hannah Wang works at Educopia Institute, where she is the Community Facilitator for the MetaArchive Cooperative and the Project Manager for the BitCuratorEdu project. Her work and research focuses on digital archives pedagogy and amplifying and coordinating the work of digital preservation practitioners through communities of practice. She currently serves on the NDSA Staffing Survey Working Group. Hannah was previously the Electronic Records & Digital Preservation Archivist at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and has taught graduate-level archives classes as an Associate Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison iSchool. She received her MSIS from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and lives in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

We are also grateful to the very talented, qualified individuals who participated in this election.

We are indebted to our outgoing Coordinating Committee members, Stephen Abrams and Salwa Ismail, for their service and many contributions. To sustain a vibrant, robust community of practice, we rely on and deeply value the contributions of all members, including those who took part in voting.

Announcing Incoming NDSA Coordinating Committee Members for 2021- 2023

Please join me in welcoming the two newly elected Coordinating Committee members Elizabeth England and Jessica Neal, and one re-elected member, Linda Tadic. Their terms begin January 1, 2021 and run through December 31, 2023.

Elizabeth England is a Digital Preservation Specialist at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, where she participates in strategic and operational initiatives and services for the preservation of born-digital and digitized records. She previously was the Digital Archivist and a National Digital Stewardship Resident at Johns Hopkins University. Elizabeth currently serves on the NDSA Communications and Publications group and the DigiPres 2020 Planning Committee.

Jessica Neal, was recently named the Sterling A. Brown Archivist at Williams College, having previously been the College Archivist at Hampshire College. Additionally, Jes is a workshop facilitator with DocNow, and a member of NDSA’s DigiPres 2020 Planning Committee.

Linda Tadic has served on the Coordinating Committee for the past two years. As an educator, she incorporates NDSA reports and projects into her courses in the UCLA Information Studies department. Additionally, Linda brings her diverse experience working in non-profit and educational archives, managing digital asset management systems, and founding Digital Bedrock, a managed digital preservation service provider.

We are also grateful to the very talented, qualified individuals who participated in this election.

We are indebted to our outgoing Coordinating Committee members, Karen Cariani, Bradley Daigle (Chair), Sibyl Schaefer, and Paige Walker, for their service and many contributions. To sustain a vibrant, robust community of practice, we rely on and deeply value the contributions of all members, including those who took part in voting.