Celebrating DigiPres 2023 and Looking Ahead to Next Year

The 2023 Digital Preservation Conference, which wrapped up in St Louis on November 16, was a welcome opportunity to connect with colleagues, hear about their work, and find opportunities for future collaborations. It was also a chance to celebrate groups and individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of digital stewardship. NDSA Leadership is grateful to the conference planning committee, presenters, attendees, and our hosts for making the event such a great success.

While the DigiPres planning committee was hard at work planning for this year’s conference, there was another working group that was reimagining what the future of the conference might look like. Like many organizations, NDSA held a virtual conference in 2020 and 2021, which allowed us to have greater attendance and a farther reach than ever before. Even as we held in-person conferences in 2022 and 2023, we were aware that returning to a pre-pandemic status quo was not feasible or desirable for many members of our community. We received feedback on the format, length, cost, and content of the conference, and we wanted to address the concerns and barriers expressed in that feedback. In late 2022, the Long-Term Conference Planning Working Group was charged with examining NDSA’s annual conference practices and making strategic recommendations on the future of NDSA conferencing and events. Over the past year, the group gathered information about a variety of conference models from other organizations and participated in facilitated discussion to brainstorm how we might make in-person NDSA events more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable.

The Long-Term Conference Planning Working Group delivered their recommendations last month. They have recommended that NDSA lengthen the interval between its national in-person conferences and create a clear mission statement for those in-person gatherings. They have also recommended that NDSA explore the implementation of smaller “Designated Community” events to be held in partnership with other national and/or regional organizations (spot the OAIS joke!). These recommendations suggest developing a more holistic strategy for programming and events held by NDSA, and they deserve time and careful consideration for implementation.

Therefore, NDSA has decided not to hold a conference in 2024. Instead, we will focus our energy on building on the recommendations made by the Long-Term Conference Planning Working Group. We have charged a new working group for NDSA Events Strategy, which will receive support from NDSA Leadership and guidance from the individuals who have stewarded the conference up until this point.

We understand that the lack of DigiPres next year will be disappointing to many members of our community. It is our hope that the community will also understand the need for a more deliberate approach to planning conferences and other events, and that planning such a strategy requires its own time and focus, especially in an organization that relies on volunteer contributions. We strongly encourage anyone who may have otherwise been involved in planning or preparing for DigiPres next year to volunteer for the NDSA Events Strategy Working Group, which will start recruiting in January 2024. We are especially interested in having participation from previous conference planning committee participants and co-chairs, as well as other individuals who have experience with programming and events.

Thank you again to everyone who helped make DigiPres 2023 the success that it was! We hope to see you at the virtual event starting January 31, 2024.

~ Hannah Wang, NDSA Coordinating Committee Chair
~ Bethany Scott, NDSA Coordinating Committee Vice Chair
~ Stacey Erdman, DigiPres Conference Planning Committee Chair
~ Déirdre Joyce, DigiPres Conference Planning Committee Vice Chair

Registration Open for NDSA’s Virtual Event

Registration is now open for NDSA’s Virtual Digital Preservation Conference Redux: Communities of Time and Place. This virtual extension of our November 2023 in-person event will feature a selection of panelists who presented in St. Louis as well as additional presenters bringing in new content, including – but not limited to – more extensive updates from our Excellence Awards Winners as well as updates from NDSA’s Interest and Working Groups. While presentations will be recorded and uploaded to NDSA’s YouTube Channel, the event will feature live discussions and Q&A with many of our talented presenters.

As we are creating the conference schedule to fit the content, a final schedule is not yet available, though it should be posted later this month (December). Even so, you can register for the event now and get all the schedule updates as they become available.

This event will be held from January 31 – February 1, 2024. In order to serve the broadest community possible, events will be held on both days from 4:00pm – 8:30pm GST (UTC +0)/11:00am – 3:30pm EST (UTC -5)/8:00am – 12:30am (UTC -8)

This NDSA Virtual Digital Preservation Conference Redux is hosted in partnership with NDSA member organization, Syracuse University Libraries and is offered at NO CHARGE to both NDSA members and non-members.

If you have any questions, please write to us at ndsa [dot] digipres [at] gmail [dot] com. We’re looking forward to seeing you online!

~ The NDSA DigiPres Planning Committee

Announcing the 2023 NDSA Excellence Award Winners

2023 Excellence Award Winners

We are pleased to highlight the 2023 Excellence Awards winners. Awards are divided into six categories: Future Stewards, Educators, Individuals, Organizations, Projects, and Sustainability Activities. Awards were presented at the 2023 Digital Preservation conference.

Read on to learn more about this year’s awardees!

Future Stewards

Future Stewards are recognized as students and early-career professionals or academics taking a creative approach to advancing knowledge of digital preservation issues and practices. This year’s awardee in the Future Stewards category is Sophia van Hoek.

Headshot of Sophia van Hoek

Sophia van Hoek recently graduated at the Reinwardt Academy (Amsterdam University of the Arts) for her BA in cultural heritage and archival studies. Her thesis research asked how the National Archives of the Netherlands can responsibly reduce the ecological impact of its IT and data storage without sacrificing digital sustainability. Green archiving is a relatively new topic within digital preservation. Sophia’s research can be seen as a practical elaboration of theoretical solutions already proposed. In addition to providing information directly relevant to the National Archives of the Netherlands, Sophia created a Green Digital Manifesto and step-by-step plans for any organization wishing to implement more environmentally sustainable digital preservation practices. As a nominator stated, “Sophia is a true ambassador for this topic and for the broader field of digital preservation.”

Congratulations, Sophia!

Educator Awards

The Educator Awards recognizes academics, trainers, and curricular endeavors promoting effective and inventive approaches to digital preservation education through academic programs, partnerships, professional development opportunities, and curriculum development.

This year’s awardee in the Educator category is Ashley Blewer.

Ashley Blewer (she/her) has been actively creating and contributing to digital preservation educational initiatives for over a decade. She strives to create open educational resources that demystify digital preservation practices and tools. Through professional positions, Ashley has created software and documentation for tools like AtoM, Archivematica, QCTools, MediaInfo, MediaConch, BWF MetaEdit, and DVRescue. Additionally, she has dedicated significant personal time to create dozens of online guides, educational blog posts, training materials, and interactive websites that support digital preservation education and are freely available. Some of these initiatives include resources for the identification of media formats (Media Format Guides), documentation of problems with digitization or digital transfer of media materials (A/V Artifact Atlas), supplemental documentation for difficult-to-understand tools (MediaInfo Parameter Definitions, ffmprovisr), and websites that support the use of digital preservation software (XML validators for PBCore and Archivematica, Collection Management System collection, Minimum Viable Station). Through these distinct efforts, she seeks to facilitate educational opportunities that are more accessible to beginners and supportive to practitioners throughout their careers.

Congratulations, Ashley!

Individual

Individuals are recognized for making a significant contribution to the digital preservation community through advances in theory or practice. This year’s awardee in the Individual category is Stephen Abrams.

Headshot of Stephen Abrams Acknowledged as a “Digital Preservation Pioneer” by the Library of Congress, Stephen Abrams emerged as an early digital stewardship trailblazer and leader. Since the 1990s, his contributions – both practical solutions and theoretical principles – have propelled our field forward and his ability to forge partnerships and surface opportunities has brought to fruition tools and standards our field has used for decades. In the early 2000s, he helped develop the archival PDF format PDF/A. During that time, he also helped design the first instantiation of the file format identification and characterization tool JHOVE, subsequently leading projects such as JHOVE2 and Cobweb, a web archiving registry.

Aside from these tools and standards, he was also an architect in one of the first in-production digital preservation repositories (the DRS at Harvard Library), which was initially launched in 2000. Returning to Harvard in 2018, he secured major grant funding to completely re-think a digital preservation infrastructure for the next generation – ensuring the outputs were shared with the greater community and not simply created within an academic silo.

Stephen possesses creative thinking and diplomacy skills which have been key in forging alliances across organizations, such as the PDF Association, the Digital Preservation Coalition and others. And as his nominator wrote, “Stephen is always looking for opportunities to usher in and advance future generations of digital stewards; never hesitating to bolster others, offer people leadership and growth opportunities, and generously giving credit to his colleagues.”

Congratulations, Stephen!

Organizations

Organizations are recognized for innovative approaches to providing support and guidance to the digital preservation community. This year’s awardee in the Organizations category is Grupo de Preservación Digital.

Group photo of Grupo de Preservación Digital

Formed in 2017 in Mexico, the Grupo de Preservación Digital (GPD) is a multidisciplinary and inter-institutional group that seeks to promote research and training in digital preservation. The group works to address the urgent need for collaboration in research and open discussion integrating diverse perspectives to produce guidelines, good practices, and policies reflecting a broad understanding of substantive tasks in and around the preservation of digital heritage materials. The group has enjoyed continued growth through the participation of not only its members, but many institutions and individuals interested in digital preservation. The GPD divides its work into three basic areas: Digital legal deposit, Research, and Technology- all of which reach the entire Spanish-speaking region. GPD hosts educational events, manages a Knowledge Base offering free access to, articles, books, and video recordings of presentations, created by the GPD, as well as a list of links to other resources.

For their work in continued advocacy for sustainable preservation of digital heritage materials, for their leadership in advancing practices and policies, and for their offering educational opportunities to the digital preservation community, we are glad to present this year’s Organization Award to the Grupo de Preservación Digital.

Congratulations to the Grupo de Preservación Digital team!

Projects

Projects are recognized for activities whose goals or outcomes represent an inventive, meaningful addition to the understanding or processes required for successful, sustainable digital preservation stewardship. This year’s awardee in the Projects category is The Reliable, Robust, and Resilient Digital Infrastructure for Nuclear Decommissioning project.

Zoom screenshot of the members of the Reliable, Robust, and Resilient Digital Infrastructure for Nuclear Decommissioning project team

The project represents a four-year partnership between the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC). The NDA is charged with the complicated task of decommissioning and cleaning the seventeen principal nuclear energy plants in the UK. The work involved the preservation of data with an extended life cycle and significant security requirements. During the initial phase of the project, the team worked to understand legacy systems and data and adapt current systems to ensure long-term viability. In the course of this critical work, the project team not only considered the unique needs of the NDA, but also sought to make connections to the wider digital preservation community. Several resources for digital preservation program assessment and technology watch guides were created and shared in conjunction with the project.

Project team members include Simon Tucker (NDA), Martin Robb (NDA (retired), Michelle Donoghue (NDA), Bob Radford (Magnox), Whitney Smith (Magnox), Gordon Reid (Nucleus), Stephen Beck (Sellafield Ltd), Martin Denvir (Sellafield Ltd), Clare Gallagher, (Nucleus), Jenny Mitcham (DPC), Paul Wheatley (DPC), Michael Popham (DPC).

Congratulations to the NDA project team!

Sustainability

The Sustainability Awards were created to recognize those activities whose goals or outcomes make a significant contribution to operational trustworthiness, monitoring, maintenance, or intervention necessary for sustainable digital preservation stewardship.

This year’s awardees in the Sustainability category are Dr. David S.H. Rosenthal & Victoria Reich.

Headshots of Dr. David S.R. Rosenthal & Victoria Reich.

2023 marks a significant date for the LOCKSS Program: It is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the friendly hikes in Joseph Grant State Park and Big Basin where Victoria Reich and Dr. David S.H. Rosenthal first conceived of LOCKSS, “lots of copies keep stuff safe,” as a guiding principle for long-term access and preservation to digital library resources. It is also the twentieth anniversary of the transition of the LOCKSS project from beta testing in 2002 to full production release. In the words of the duo’s nominator, “Even if you don’t know David Rosenthal and Vicky Reich by name, you’ve almost certainly heard their rallying cry for digital preservation: Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. This ethos has informed digital preservation best practices since its introduction, and has shaped the design and implementation of the LOCKSS open-source software.”

David Rosenthal and Vicky Reich’s brainchild—and the enduring preservation networks that it has made possible—was at the leading edge of a global wave of digital preservation initiatives in the early 21st century. The effectiveness and reliability of LOCKSS software has been validated through rigorous third-party evaluation, including ongoing certification of the CLOCKSS archive as a trustworthy digital repository under the TRAC standard since 2014. The LOCKSS project has provided enduring proof of the concept that large-scale digital preservation work can be accomplished cost-effectively and with community benefits (not vendor profits) as the primary driver.

Rosenthal and Reich’s work on LOCKSS stands as a benchmark against which other approaches to digital preservation and persistent access to digital resources are measured.

Congratulations to all!

Excellence Awards Working Group

The 2023 NDSA Excellence Awards Working Group was led by co-chairs Kari May (University of Pittsburgh Libraries) and Matt McEniry (Texas Tech University Libraries), with members Julie Allen (Open Preservation Foundation), Chris Banuelos (Rice University Libraries), Sarah Middleton (Digital Preservation Coalition Representative), Dorothea Salo (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Jessica Venlet (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries). Aliya Reich at CLIR provided administrative support for the entire awards process. In addition to information about the Excellence Awards group, the group’s website provides information on past winners.

Mini-Job Fair at NDSA DigiPres 2023

While large professional organizations like ALA and SAA have organized job fairs to coincide with conferences, NDSA hasn’t yet done this, until now. After noticing people recruiting at digital preservation conferences in the past year, I began to think why not? Well, one good reason is that NDSA is not a dues-collecting professional organization and doesn’t have the same resources or capacity of ALA or SAA. It falls to individuals at member institutions to propose ideas and so I submitted a vague proposal that necessarily did not contain a lot of details. When it was accepted, I immediately realized that I needed help, even for a “mini” job fair and enlisted Robin Ruggaber, also a past NDSA Coordinating Committee Chair, to help pull it off. This blog post describes our vision for this session.

In the coming months, Robin and I will be scouring listservs and job boards and reaching out to employers to identify five open jobs that can be highlighted during the session. We hope to represent different types of employers, such as higher education, government, service providers, and other cultural heritage organizations, small and large; and different types of jobs involving digital preservation skills such as, digital preservation librarian, preservation infrastructure engineer, digital archivist, or service manager. Preference will be given to employers that disclose pay, demonstrate a commitment to hiring and retaining a diverse and welcoming workforce, and to organizations that promote employee wellbeing. If you are or are planning to recruit for a digital preservation position during the time of the conference and are interested in participating, please contact Nathan Tallman (ntt7@psu.edu) or Robin Ruggaber (robin.ruggaber@virginia.edu).

Each of these five jobs will be presented to the audience, hopefully by someone from the hiring organization. Presenters will be asked to share the expected impacts of a successful candidate within one week, one month, and one year of hire. Other details we expect to be shared include salary range, examples of how required and preferred qualifications may be met, and how to apply. No interviews are planned as part of this event. If there is extra time, other employers will be able to engage the audience in position design for anticipated digital preservation jobs.

But that’s not all! In addition to highlighting five open jobs, Robin and I will recruit digital preservation managers willing to review resumes/CVs and coach applicants conducting a job search. We hope there will be enough space in Regency A to allow both activities to occur concurrently, but if needed resume/CV review and job coaching may occur throughout the venue.

These are our goals for this session. Our ability to be successful largely depends on the job market this fall and the availability of digital preservation hiring managers during the conference. Some of these details might change for practical reasons as Robin and I carry out planning and logistics, but we are optimistic. As NDSA grows, more organizations are looking to hire. We hope this session will help make connections between people and employers and set a precedent in our community.

Please join us on November 15th, 2:30-3:30pm in Regency A.

~ Nathan Tallman, Past NDSA Coordinating Committee Chair

Catching up with past NDSA Excellence Awards Winners: Dr. Dinesh Katre!

The NDSA Individual Excellence Award honors individuals making significant contributions to the digital preservation community. In 2019, Dr. Dinesh Katre was one of two awardees in this category. Dr. Katre was recognized for his work to advocate for and deploy the Indian National Digital Preservation Programme which provides a robust and comprehensive platform for the effective long-term preservation of digital materials. As Chief Investigator of the Programme’s flagship project to establish a Center of Excellence for Digital Preservation,

Headshot of Dr. Dinesh Katre, Senior Director & Head of Department, Centre for Development of Advance Computing (C-DAC), Pune, INDIA.

Dr. Katre led the process to develop a digital preservation standard for India. He also conceptualized, designed and led the development of DIGITĀLAYA, a software framework, which comprehensively implements the OAIS reference model. Katre’s efforts culminated in the first repository in the world to achieve ISO 16363 certification.

We recently caught up with Dr. Katre to learn more about the progress of his work on the Indian National Digital Preservation program and other projects over the last few years.

1) What have you been doing since receiving an NDSA Excellence Award?

I have spearheaded the working group constituted by Supreme Court of India, which has defined the Digital Preservation Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for the Indian Judiciary which provides coverage for Supreme Court of India, 25 High Courts and 672 District Courts. The SOP provides guidelines and recommendations with regard to Information Governance (IG) policies for courts, digitization of judicial records, cloud infrastructure for establishing Judicial Digital Repositories, tools and technologies, standards, AI/ML based applications to leverage upon massive data repositories to modernize the Indian Judiciary for accelerating the justice delivery. Most interestingly, we conducted 5 rounds of surveys across all high courts and district courts to collect information on various aspects of digitization. Huge amount of data was collected and analyzed for developing the insights. I am pleased to inform that the Digital Preservation Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) has been approved by honorable Chief Justice of India and sanctioned by the Law Ministry for implementation across the judiciary. The SOP is available at the following URL: https://ecommitteesci.gov.in/document/digital-preservation/

2) What did receiving the NDSA award mean to you?

I have worked extensively towards establishing the Indian National Digital Preservation Program since 2008, which involved development of archival systems, tools, standards, and digital repositories to comply as per the ISO 16363. As a part of my research, I had organized an Indo-US workshop to study the international trends in digital preservation in collaboration with the experts from National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) of the Library of Congress. I knew that National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) was originally launched by NDIIPP in 2010. Therefore, it was an immensely inspiring and encouraging moment for me to receive the NDSA Individual Innovation Award in 2019.

3) What efforts/advances of the last few years have you been impressed with or admired in the field of data stewardship and/or digital preservation?

I am particularly impressed with the advances in Digital Humanities and Computational Archival Science (CAS) which leverage upon artificial Intelligence/machine learning technologies to enable automation of digital preservation procedures and knowledge extraction from the digital repositories.

4) How has your work evolved since you won the Excellence Award?

The NDSA award infused me with a great deal of confidence and courage to embrace the evolving technological landscape. Since then, I have initiated R & D on the development of intelligent archiving tools for automatic metadata extraction, ontology-based classification of records, document orientation detection, visual entity tagging in miniature paintings and information extraction from documents.

5) What do you currently see as some of the biggest challenges or opportunities in digital preservation?

Whether proprietary or open source, the major challenge is heterogeneity and inconsistency in the properties of file formats. The digital preservation domain has been relying on open-source file formats but we must understand that they are primarily evolved for the purpose of interoperability. Therefore, a wider consensus is required for defining comprehensive “Universally Intelligible & Interoperable File Formats (UNIIFormats, a term coined by me) for all major types of contents, which would be specially designed for the purpose of digital preservation. The proposed UNIIFormats should provide built-in support for self-description, knowledge markup, semantic linkability, searchability, accessibility, discoverability, authenticity, and backward & forward compatibility. One should have a choice of storing information in the proposed UNIIFormat, if it requires long term retention. Incorporating so many properties into a file format may sound a bit utopian but I feel that there has not been much evolution and advancement in the file formats as compared with other technological advancements.

Presently, producing these properties for the data requires you to avail separate, fragmented, and paid application services. It may be beneficial for business but detrimental for preserving the digital footprint of the human civilization. Post-processing of the data for preservation is very laborious, costly, prone to loss of information, errors, and mis-interpretation.

We also require to use AI ML techniques for creating knowledge services to leverage the massive data repositories, which can help in long term sustenance.

You may like to refer my presentation on “Digital Eternity: Innovating a Future for the Past” which is available at the following URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpr4ypE88qI&t=3047s

6) Are you working on any new digital preservation related projects at the moment?

I am presently leading the Digital Preservation for the Indian Judiciary initiative and Digital Preservation of Sanskrit Encyclopedic Dictionary project which is supported under the Science & Heritage Research Initiative (SHRI) of the Department of Science and Technology (DST).

Catching up with past NDSA Excellence Awards Winners: Asociación Iberoamericana de Preservación Digital (APREDIG)

The Asociación Iberoamericana de Preservación Digital (APREDIG) won the 2019 Organization Innovation Award. APREDIG is a nonprofit Ibero-American association founded at the end of 2017 in Barcelona, Spain, with the intention of promoting the importance of digital preservation in Spainish-speaking countries. Its activity has culminated in projects and activities to disseminate a Spanish translation of the original NDSA Levels of Preservation, opening-up significant new opportunities for expanding digital stewardship best practices, and subsequent outcomes, by practitioners in Spain and Latin America. Led by Dr. Miquel Termens and Dr. David Leija Román (Universitat de Barcelona), this group of volunteers, researchers, and disseminators of best practices for digital preservation have created an online self-assessment tool to help Institutions of Spain and Mexico understand recommendations, key concepts, and simple diagnosis of digital preservation practices using the NDSA Levels as a guideline.

Headshot of David Leija

We recently caught up with Dr. David Leija Román to learn more about the organization’s progress in the last few years. His responses, in English and Spanish, are available below!

1) What have you been doing since receiving the NDSA Excellence Award?

We have supported many Institutions in Latin America to correctly apply the NDSA guidelines with workshops and introductory sessions on digital preservation, as well as publishing articles and providing non-profit support to Institutions in the development of their digital preservation policies.

2) What did it mean for you to receive the NDSA award?

It means a lot and has filled us with great emotion to be part of the excellent effort made by the NDSA, since the work of spreading the importance of digital preservation in institutions with few economic and information resources in Latin America is still a subject in training, so this award motivated us to specialize more in what the NDSA does and communicate it in Spanish to our community.

3) What efforts/advances/ideas in recent years have impressed or admired you in the field of data management and/or digital preservation?

One of the most impressive things I have seen in Latin America is the possibility to innovate in the use of NDSA levels in small archival institutions, since with few technological and human resources they have created programs that start with diagnoses of very specific needs, to be communicated to authorities as the importance of digital preservation and from there to create with science about what should be done. This has only been possible thanks to the guidance of the NDSA levels.

4) How has your work evolved since you won the Award of Excellence?

Mainly, we have become referent disseminators of the NDSA levels guidelines in Spanish, which means a great responsibility to always transmit in the best possible way its objectives and continuous improvements. Today we seek to participate in productive tables and create a network of more integrated in the subject to support each other.

5) What do you currently see as some of the biggest challenges or opportunities in digital preservation?

In short, it is still the lack of culture about the importance of digital preservation, since the administrations in Latin America are periodic and rotating, so understanding what has been done before and preserving the progress, sometimes in the changes of administration must start again. It is where guidelines such as NDSA and the work of solid declarative policies, help to neutralize the advances so that they are transmitted and continue to move forward with the sustainability of these.

6) Are you working on any new projects related to digital preservation? If so, could you share a bit about the project(s)?

We are currently working hand in hand with the wonderful network of digital preservation services CARINIANA, coordinated by Miguel Márdero. We have several work projects at the digital heritage level in Brazil with the collaboration of different Ibero-American experts. In Mexico we are collaborating with digital preservation repository seedbeds in northern Mexico with the Autonomous University of Tamaulipas and in the design and validation of digital preservation policies. From this aspect we have published articles since 2017 on the use of NDSA levels (https://revista.profesionaldelainformacion.com/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2017.may.11 ) and on Digital Preservation Policies (https://bid.ub.edu/es/50/leija.htm) to support knowledge transfer in Spanish on the subject.

Click here to read about the other winners of 2019 NDSA Innovation Awards!

Do you know an organization that is working toward clever, inventive, and risk-taking approaches to the challenges and potential of digital preservation? Help us highlight and reward their efforts! Click here to submit a 2023 NDSA Excellence Awards nomination.

Responses in Spanish are below:

1) ¿Qué ha estado haciendo desde que recibió el Premio a la Excelencia de la NDSA?

Hemos apoyado a muchas Instituciones en Latinoamérica para aplicar correctamente las directrices de NDSA levels con talleres y jornadas introductorias a la preservación digital, así como publicar artículos y apoyar sin ánimo de lucro a Instituciones en el desarrollo de sus políticas de preservación digital.

2) ¿Qué significó para usted recibir el premio NDSA?

Significa muchísimo y nos ha llenado de mucha emoción de ser parte de el excelente esfuerzo que hace la NDSA, ya que el trabajo de divulgar la importancia de la preservación digital en Instituciones con pocos recursos económicos y de información en Latinoamérica sigue siendo una asignatura en formación, por lo que este premio nos motivó a especializarnos más en lo que hace la NDSA y comunicarlo en español a nuestra comunidad.

3) ¿Qué esfuerzos/avances/ideas de los últimos años le han impresionado o admirado en el campo de la administración de datos y/o la preservación digital?

Una de las cosas más impresionantes que he visto en Latinoamérica principalmente es la posibilidad de innovar en el uso de NDSA levels en pequeñas Instituciones de archivos, ya que con pocos recursos tecnológicos y humanos se han creado programas que inician con diagnósticos de necesidades muy específicas, para ser comunicadas a autoridades a modo de importancia de la preservación digital y de ahí crear conciencia sobre lo que se debe hacer. Esto solo se ha podido lograr gracias a la guía de los NDSA levels.

4) ¿Cómo ha evolucionado tu trabajo desde que ganaste el Premio a la Excelencia?

Principalmente nos hemos convertido en divulgadores referentes de las directrices NDSA levels en habla hispana (español), esto significa una gran responsabilidad de siempre transmitir de la mejor forma posible sus objetivos y mejoras continuas. Hoy en día buscamos participar en mesas productivas y crear red de más integrantes en el tema para apoyarnos mutuamente.

5) ¿Cuáles ve actualmente como algunos de los mayores desafíos u oportunidades en la preservación digital?

En definitiva sigue siendo la falta de cultura sobre la importancia de la preservación digital, ya que las administraciones en America latina son periódicas y rotativas, por lo que el entender que se ha hecho antes y conservar los avances, a veces en los cambios de administración se debe iniciar de nuevo. Es donde las directrices como NDSA y el trabajo de políticas sólidas declarativas, ayudan a neutralizar los avances para que estos sean transmitidos y seguir avanzando con la sostenibilidad de estos.

6) ¿Estás trabajando en algún nuevo proyecto relacionado con la preservación digital? Si es así, ¿podría compartir un poco sobre el (los) proyecto (s)?

Actualmente trabajamos de la mano con la estupenda red de servicios de preservación digital CARINIANA, que coordina Miguel Márdero. Tenemos varios proyectos de trabajo a nivel de patrimonio digital en Brasil con la colaboración de diferentes expertos iberoamericanos. En México estamos colaborando con semilleros de repositorios de preservación digital en el norte de México con la Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas y en el diseño y validación de políticas de preservación digital. Desde está vertiente hemos publicado artículos desde el 2017 sobre el uso de NDSA levels (https://revista.profesionaldelainformacion.com/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2017.may.11 ) y sobre Políticas de Preservación digital (https://bid.ub.edu/es/50/leija.htm) para apoyar en transferencia de conocimiento en español sobre el tema.

¡Haga clic aquí para leer sobre otros ganadores de los Premios a la Innovación NDSA 2019!

¿Conoce alguna organización que esté trabajando para lograr enfoques inteligentes, inventivos y arriesgados para los desafíos y el potencial de la preservación digital? ¡Ayúdanos a destacar y recompensar sus esfuerzos! Haga clic aquí para enviar una nominación a los Premios a la Excelencia NDSA 2023.

Programs are Live for CLIR’s 2023 Events: DLF Forum, Learn@DLF, and DigiPres

The Council on Library and Information Resources is delighted to announce the release of the full conference programs for our in-person events happening in St. Louis, Missouri, this November: the Digital Library Federation’s (DLF) Forum and Learn@DLF, and NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2023: Communities of Time and Place. This year’s programs are full of exciting content, and you won’t want to miss them.

Explore the Programs

Join us for our events on the following dates:

November 12: Learn@DLF, pre-conference day of workshops
November 13-15: The DLF Forum
November 15-16: NDSA’s Digital Preservation: Communities of Time and Place

While each of our events is unique, all three contain exciting content presented in a variety of formats, ranging from focused lightning talks to longer panels, short presentations to half-day workshops. With 4-5 simultaneous tracks, there’s always something interesting happening at CLIR’s fall events. We are grateful to our volunteer Reviewers and Program Committees, without whom these fabulous programs would not have come together.

Secure the early bird rate, register for our events, book your hotel, browse our new community-written St. Louis local guide, 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? We’d be happy to help. Contact us at forum@diglib.org.

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

Council on Library and Information Resources: https://www.clir.org/
Digital Library Federation: https://www.diglib.org/
NDSA: https://ndsa.org/

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

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 DLF Forum (#DLFforum): November 13-15
Learn@DLF pre-conference workshop day (#LearnAtDLF): November 12
NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2023: Communities of Time and Place (#DigiPres23): November 15-16

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.

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!