Member Fee Survey: Feedback Requested

NDSA has been an active membership organization since its founding in 2010. It advocates for the digital stewardship needs of its member organizations, convenes a community of practice, and provides professional development opportunities for its members. Today, NDSA is completely run by volunteers from its member organizations, with administrative assistance subsidized by CLIR.

NDSA membership has always been free for any organization committed to long-term digital stewardship. While NDSA has thrived thanks to an active network of volunteers, this model has also presented many challenges to NDSA’s sustainability and independence as the organization has grown and matured. While NDSA was fortunate to have been funded through the Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program in our early years, and has received financial support from CLIR since 2016, we now find ourselves unable to fulfill our mission and goals without a sustainable funding model.

NDSA funding would enable us to hire a community manager, who would onboard and support NDSA members, coordinate communications and outreach, and assist with NDSA in-person and virtual events. These are all unmet needs that have been identified as high priority through member surveys, interviews, and discussions within NDSA Leadership.

Over the past few years, NDSA engaged in many activities to uncover these unmet needs. The Task Force on Membership Engagement and Recruitment began in 2021. The group conducted a survey of NDSA’s member base to measure the current value of benefit offerings and understand how to attract and recruit broader partnerships. Survey results led to the creation of the Membership Working Group, charged with discussing the findings on membership types and fees, criteria for evaluating new members, improving the new member onboarding, and more. In 2023, the Membership Working Group held group listening forums and individual interviews to gain more information on member preferences and opportunities for NDSA to engage with and grow our membership. The group recently completed its recommendations on improvements and expansion of NDSA’s member engagement, and submitted a report for review by the NDSA Leadership.

Concurrently in 2022, NDSA Leadership began efforts to explore the optimal organizational alignment to meet member needs and help NDSA fulfill its mission and to serve as a national leader in the field of digital preservation. Through this evaluation, NDSA refreshed its Mission, Vision, and Values and developed a summary of its current host relationship with CLIR, its operational support requirements, and its financial impact.

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. The group recommended that NDSA lengthen the interval between its national in-person conferences, incorporate more virtual options, and create a clear mission statement for those in-person gatherings. They also recommended that NDSA explore the implementation of smaller “Designated Community” events that would be accessible to more of its members. Through these recommendations, NDSA will develop a more holistic strategy for its programming and events. A new working group focused on implementing these improvements to NDSA events began its work in May 2024.

When thinking about how to financially support these growing needs, NDSA Leadership has discussed a sliding scale membership fee model, organizational vs. individual memberships, vendor sponsorships, and revenue from events such as the DigiPres conference. Your feedback is critical to help us determine a membership fee schedule that would be both sustainable and affordable. If a fee-for-membership model is not feasible for a majority of member organizations, NDSA will evaluate its other funding options. However, without sustainable funding, meeting the most basic needs of NDSA’s members will be at risk and NDSA’s strategic goals will not be met.

In order to evaluate these funding options, we have created a brief survey which should take about 10 minutes to complete. The survey will be sent out via email to NDSA’s member representatives – please keep an eye on your inbox! In exchange for completing the survey, you may choose to be entered into a raffle for one free registration to the next DigiPres conference. (Your contact information will only be used for the raffle and will not be included in the dataset for analysis.) We request that you complete the survey by September 10, 2024.

If you have any questions or comments, please contact Bethany Scott, NDSA Coordinating Committee Chair, at ndsa[dot]digipres [at] gmail [dot] com. Thank you for your feedback and support!

NDSA Welcomes Four New Members in Quarter Two of 2023

As of June 2023, the NDSA Leadership unanimously voted to welcome its four most recent applicants into the membership. Each new member brings a host of skills and experience to our group. Read the brief introductions of each below, keep an eye out for them on your calls and be sure to give them a shout out. Please join me in welcoming our new members! To review our list of all members, you can see them here.

Hamilton College Library and Information Technology Services

Hamilton College Library and Information Technology Services’ activities include: supporting digitized special collections content; developing procedures and guidelines for digital preservation, both within the library and to support faculty partnerships; developing a digital preservation roadmap that relies heavily on the NDSA Levels of Preservation to assess and visualize their starting point and progress. Looking ahead, they anticipate born digital archival collections growing, and plan to select a storage solution suitable for long-term digital preservation.

Hamilton College is interested in joining NDSA to seek continuing education to support and grow their commitment to digital preservation, to join a community of practice where they can both benefit from the knowledge of others and contribute back to the field, and to increase their connections in the digital preservation professional community.

Texas State University

The Texas State University Libraries is committed to digital preservation of library and cultural heritage assets held and created by all departments, including Wittliff Special Collections, University Archives, Institutional Repository and data management, and general collections. Key initiatives completed by Texas State University Libraries’ Digital Preservation Committee include obtaining secure designated server storage for digital preservation content, and creating process to request increases in this storage; writing a Digital Preservation Policy; implementing Archivematica; and purchasing space and support for DuraCloud via the Texas Digital Library (TDL) digital preservation service DuraCloud@TDL. Committee members are active locally in TDL, regularly presenting and sitting and chairing committees. Texas State University Libraries looks forward to opportunities to contribute to NDSA initiatives and collaborate with colleagues in the field internationally.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Libraries sought to join NDSA in order to contribute to and be a part of national standards and best practices for digital preservation. They currently preserve digitized and born-digital content from their Historical Collections, including the UAB Archives and the Reynolds-Finley Historical Library. In the near future, they plan to expand this to include web archiving, A/V materials, and 3D models and digital reproductions. Down the line they anticipate work on preserving complex digital objects, such as software, multimedia theses, and digital humanities projects.

University of Rochester

In the past few years, the University of Rochester (UR) has made a concerted commitment to building out a robust digital preservation program to ensure the digital assets entrusted to UR’s stewardship are available far into the future. This has involved contracting with Preservica as a technology solution, hiring two full time staff dedicated to the work (a Digital Asset Management Lead and Digital Asset Management Analyst), building out a policy portfolio to characterize and support the work, and providing a consistent funding stream for all the above.

UR works extensively with digitized special collections (including large amounts of A/V), born digital archival materials, and web archives. The University of Rochester desires to continue to deepen involvement with this work by joining with other practitioners to learn from the wealth of knowledge present in the community and to contribute back to it by sharing what is learned over the course of UR’s work, as well as by engaging in professional service opportunities through NDSA.

Join us for NDSA Membership Listening Forums

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

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

Please register for March 8th here.

Please register for March 22nd here.

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

~ The NDSA Membership Working Group

NDSA 2022 Year in Review

As we begin 2023 we wanted to take a moment to look back at NDSA activities over the past year. Please take a look at the things we’ve accomplished and think about how you can participate this year!

NDSA Leadership

This summer, NDSA Leadership went through an facilitated exercise to discuss NDSA strategy and how we engage with the marketplace of digital preservation service providers. One result of this exercise is a refreshed NDSA Foundational Strategy, which includes tweaks to our mission and vision statements, adds Transparency and Openness as values, and now includes operating principles based on our values. These new principles will be used as guidestones as we conclude this work on service provider engagement. In October, NDSA sponsored an open conversation on the Ithaka S+R report, The Effectiveness and Durability of Digital Preservation and Curation Systems. This conversation provided space for the community to react to the report and discuss its implications, you can read a summary on the NDSA News blog.

Membership Updates

Following our new quarterly membership review process, we welcomed a total of 15 new members, with 5 of those being international members from Africa (3), Iceland, and Mexico. We look forward to working with and learning from our new members.

As existing members, the new year is a good time to make sure your organization’s contact information is up to date. A simple form is available to assist with this process.

Interest Groups

Content Interest Group

During 2022 one of our co-chairs, Deb Verhoff stepped down and we welcomed Deon Schutte who now, together with Brenda Burk leads the content interest group.
Nathan Tallman spoke to us about appraisal and selection for digital preservation at our first meeting in February.
At our May meeting we officially said goodbye to Deb Verhoff and had an interesting discussion about the new forms of content that are created in news organizations and the implications thereof for digital preservation.
Dealing with content that has both cultural and ethical concerns, as well as offensive content was the topic of the presentation and discussion led by the University of Cape Town during the August meeting. Andrea Walker, an archivist from the University of Cape Town spoke to us about an ongoing digital curation project involving the ǂKhomani San.
Our last meeting of 2022 was a casual affair with new members to the NDSA (those who joined in 2022) coming to tell us about themselves and their organizations. We look forward to interacting with and learning from them during 2023.

Infrastructure Interest Group

In 2022, the Infrastructure Interest Group met quarterly and focused on exploring topics of common interest through invited presentations, solution sessions where members bring their challenges and questions to the group, article discussions, and an in person event at DigiPres2022. Topics explored included:

Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) and Implementation presented by Andrew Woods, Princeton University
Geographic Distribution in Cloud Environments
- Presentation “Calculating the Costs of Redundant Storage” by Martha Anderson, University of Arkansas
- Presentation and facilitated discussion on distributed cloud storage by Leslie Johnson, Director of Digital Preservation at NARA
Discussion post review of:
- The Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values put forth by the Digital Preservation Services Collaborative
- Preservica’s Charter for Long-Term Digital Preservation Sustainability
Solution Discussion Topics
- Non-public sharing of digital born materials
- Potential use of W3C’s Screen Capture for digital preservation
- Secondary server storage

Standards and Practice Interest Group

Standards and Practices welcomed a new co-chair, Ann Hanlon (UWM), who joined continuing co-chair, Felicity Dykas.
The Standards and Practices Interest Group held quarterly meetings, with the following agendas:.
- January: A presentation by Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, Digital Archivist at the Smithsonian, on preservation standards for digital video files. It was well attended and provided quite a bit of useful information.
- April: A working session to identify glossaries that address terminology used in digital preservation. This will be re-reviewed and posted in 2023.
- July: We discussed staffing for digital preservation, using two slides from the Staffing Survey questionnaire as a jumping off point. Attendees expressed challenges with staffing, and noted different staffing models.
- October: We ended the year with a presentation on the Digital Preservation Coalition Competency Audit Toolkit (DPC CAT) given by Amy Currie and Sharon McMeekin of DPC. We appreciated the preview on the Toolkit, which was publicly released shortly after the meeting.

Working Groups

Communication and Publications Working Group

The Communications and Publications group works to support Leadership and co-chairs of the Interest and Working groups through creating documentation, updating the website, and posting to social media and the NDSA blog. The items below are highlights of completed activities in 2022.

DigiPres Conference Organization Committee

The 2022 DigiPres Conference was held October 12-13 in Baltimore, Maryland. Highlights from the conference can be found in this wrap-up post. The opening plenary video will be released soon, keep your eyes open for an announcement.
A virtual session to accommodate additional sessions from the 2022 Conference is being planned for February 2023.
The 2023 DigiPres Conference will be held at the St. Louis Union Station Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri on November 15-16.

Excellence Awards Working Group

In line with our new working agreement with the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), only the DPC Digital Preservation Awards were awarded in 2022. In 2023, the NDSA Excellence Awards will be presented at the annual Digital Preservation conference.
If you are interested in participating in this group, keep your eyes out for a call for participation!

Levels of Digital Preservation

The steering group has established a Levels of Preservation ‘office hour’. This is held once every 2 months and provides a forum for members of the community to drop in and discuss the Levels and ask questions. Specific topics covered within these sessions include a focus on community archives and their use of the levels and a discussion about documentation. Do come along to future ‘office hour’ sessions – we would love to see you there! (See the NDSA Calendar of Events for specific dates)
We were excited to cheer the Levels of Preservation all the way to the quarter finals of World Cup of Digital Preservation! Unfortunately they were beaten in the semi-finals by PRONOM which then went on to win the tournament!
A Dutch translation of the NDSA Levels has been published. A big thank you to Lotte Wijsman for providing this!
The group continues to respond to comment and feedback on the Levels. Do use our feedback form if you would like to share your thoughts on the Levels and associated resources with the steering group.

Membership Working Group

A newly formed Membership Working Group grew out of the 2021 Membership Task Force, which conducted a survey on a wide range of membership issues, and published a report on their findings.
We will build our work around the findings of the report published by the Membership Task Force.
If you are interested in joining this working group, we are still recruiting participants, please see our call to get involved!

Staffing Survey

The 2021 Staffing Survey Report was published in August. The report documents survey responses from 269 individuals, covering topics such as digital preservation activities and staffing qualifications. Additional information for review, including the Survey codebook and data files, are also available in the NDSA OSF.
In September, members of the Staffing Survey Working Group presented a peer-reviewed panel presentation at iPres in Glasgow, Scotland. A short paper is available in the conference proceedings (p. 424). An additional presentation at the DigiPres conference in October led to an engaging audience conversation about digital preservation staffing.

Web Archiving Survey

The Web Archiving Survey Group was re-established to refresh the survey which was last distributed in 2017
190 survey responses were received — 72.6% from institutions and individuals in the United States, and 27.4% from international institutions and individuals
The report is currently being worked on and we are aiming for a Spring 2023 release!

NDSA Welcomes Two New Members

As of 13 December 2022, the NDSA Leadership unanimously voted to welcome two recent applicants into the membership. Each new member brings a host of skills and experience to our group. Keep an eye out for them on your calls and be sure to give them a shout out. Please join me in welcoming our new members.

Brigham Young University

Brigham Young University‘s library has been involved in digital preservation work for over a decade, primarily preserving master digitized files and in recent years, accepting more and more born-digital manuscript items and web archives. Their archive currently holds 87 TB and about 2.5 million files, and they currently add between ten and fifteen TB each year. They are growing their Digital Initiatives department, and seeking to better develop policies, workflows, systems, and outreach in order to ensure the longevity of their important digital collections. They are looking forward to engaging with national peers in the conversations, research, collaborations, and initiatives surrounding the art of digital preservation.

KRIA: The Icelandic Constitution Archives

KRIA is a community effort to gather and make openly available the content around the citizen-driven Icelandic constitutional reform process. In 2011, Iceland rewrote its constitution using an historically open approach. This offered an inspiring new way to think about how citizens can participate in policy reform using available technology. What resulted was a draft constitution that was affirmed by a public referendum. Iceland’s proposed constitution has not yet been ratified by Althingi (the Icelandic Parliament), but the initiative is still alive and gaining international attention. However, the ephemeral nature of digital-born content poses a threat to the constitutional process materials safety and public access. The KRIA archive hopes to make this information available as a resource for the community, scholars, and future generations. Among the partners in this effort are the Icelandic Constitutional Society, Icelandic National Archives, the University of Washington, the University of Iceland, and peace building nonprofit Build Up.

~ posted by Hannah Wang, Vice Chair of the NDSA Coordinating Committee

Call for Participation: NDSA Membership Working Group

Looking to get involved with NDSA in the new year? We’re looking for members who want to be a part of the conversations that shape our membership models going forward.

We will discuss:

The feasibility of membership fees, such as paid tiers.
Affiliate memberships for individuals vs. institutional memberships.
Criteria for evaluating new members.
Increasing membership.
Early career and student outreach.
New member onboarding.

View more about the Membership Working Group here. If you are interested in discussing these issues, please contact Rachel Appel (rappel@upenn.edu) or Stacey Erdman (staceyerdman@arizona.edu). We especially welcome new members. We ask that volunteers remain on this working group for a two-year term. Please let us know by January 17th.

Best,
~Rachel Appel, University of Pennsylvania
~ Stacey Erdman, University of Arizona

NDSA Welcomes Three New Members

As of 14 June 2022, the NDSA Leadership unanimously voted to welcome its three most recent applicants into the membership. Each new member brings a host of skills and experience to our group. Keep an eye out for them on your calls and be sure to give them a shout out. Please join me in welcoming our new members.

Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Inc.

Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator supports contemporary emerging artists who explore and experiment with new forms and themes that challenge traditional definitions of Caribbean and Latin American art. Diaspora Vibe is an IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) awardee that has worked in partnership with the University of Miami’s Special Collections and Digital Library of the Caribbean at Florida International University to preserve, digitize, and increase access to its archive focusing on artists from the Caribbean and Latin American Diaspora.

Rochester Institute of Technology Libraries

RIT Libraries has been committed to and engaged in digital preservation activities for seven years. They are excited to become active and engaged members of NDSA in order to learn and develop strategies that will enable them to make a stronger case locally for development and implementation of a digital preservation infrastructure. They are most interested in the areas of infrastructure, sustainability, and standards and best practices.

University of Texas at Arlington Libraries

UTA Libraries focuses on web archives using Archive-It, preserving born-digital related to the collecting areas of UTA Special Collections in the UTA Libraries Digital Archive, powered by Preservica, and preserving data in the Mavs Dataverse with the assistance of the Texas Digital Library. They are excited to be a part of the larger international conversation surrounding digital preservation, staying up-to-date with technological change, and monitoring new developments in the digital preservation field.

Posted by Hannah Wang, Vice Chair of the NDSA Coordinating Committee on behalf of the Coordinating Committee

NDSA Welcomes Four New Members

As of 8 March 2022, the NDSA Leadership unanimously voted to welcome its four most recent applicants into the membership. Each new member brings a host of skills and experience to our group. Keep an eye out for them on your calls and be sure to give them a shout out. Please join me in welcoming our new members.

Quantum Corp

Quantum Corp’s goal is to be the leading provider of management and storage services for unstructured data. They mainly focus on designing solutions to address the problems associated with managing and the storage of large data repositories and archives.

University of Cape Town Libraries

University of Cape Town Libraries is particularly interested in growing broad-based general awareness, basic understanding, and active participation in their digital preservation systems & services for the university as a whole. Their burgeoning network of Data Stewards & Champions, an interdisciplinary community of practice working to develop and maintain a vibrant, sustainable data culture, is an important vehicle for this.

Vanderbilt University Library

Vanderbilt University Library is interested in learning from others’ digital stewardship experiences as well as sharing theirs with the NDSA community. The Library currently holds digital archives with audiovisual, textual, and image-based content. They are using several different systems to archive them, including Glacier, ArchivesSpace, Archivematica, Fedora, and Portico. The Library preserves a number of collections, including the TVNews archive and Vanderbilt yearbooks.

WiLS (Wisconsin Library Services, Inc.)

WiLS is a non-profit membership organization that facilitates collaboration and innovation in order to advance library service in the state of Wisconsin and beyond. Since 2005, WiLS has provided consortium management and leadership for the Recollection Wisconsin statewide digital collections program. Notable and recent WiLS digital stewardship projects and initiatives include Recollection Wisconsin’s Curating Community Digital Collections program (IMLS), the Digital Readiness Community of Practice implementation project (NHPRC), mentorship of two national cohorts of tribal libraries engaged in community memory projects (through the IMLS’s Accelerating Promising Practices initiative), and their work with the Ho-Chunk Nation and other Wisconsin tribal communities to increase their capacity in digital collections development and management.

~ Hannah Wang, Vice Chair of the NDSA Coordinating Committee

Welcome Seven new NDSA Member Organizations

As of 14 December 2021, the NDSA Leadership voted to welcome its seven most recent applicants into the membership. Each new member brings a host of skills and experience to our group. Keep an eye out for them on your calls and be sure to give them a shout out; please join me in welcoming our new members. To review our list of members, you can see them here.

In addition to approving new memberships, the Coordinating Committee also voted to remove 14 members in 2021. These members were removed after several years of no contact, despite multiple attempts to try. It is vital that NDSA members keep their contacts updated, if you’ve had changes in our organization, please complete the Membership Contact Update form. More information about updating your contacts can be found on the Member Orientation webpage.

Digital Library of the Caribbean

Founded in 2004, the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) has grown from nine founding partners to over seventy partners in the United States, the Caribbean, Canada, Central and South America, and Europe. dLOC is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC supports collaborative project development and initiatives for digitization, preservation, rights, integration with teaching and research, and more. These activities complement the work by the dLOC partners, who contribute content, time, and expertise in shared governance.

University of Wisconsin-Madison General Library System

The University of Wisconsin-Madison General Library System is developing a Digital Preservation Repository, with partial support from the Mellon Foundation. The development of a digital preservation repository is a critical step towards strengthening our capacity to preserve digital objects and artifacts, e.g. texts, images, recordings, electronic theses and dissertations, and ensuring that these research resources will remain accessible for future generations of scholars.

The ARK Alliance

The ARK Alliance is heir to the successful ARKs-in-the-Open initiative, which began in 2018 with the goal of launching an open, global community around Archival Resource Keys (ARKs) and their use as persistent identifiers in the scholarly ecosystem. The community comprises institutions and people who use or assign Archival Resource Key (ARK) identifiers as well as those interested in promoting ARKs and sustaining the open ARK infrastructure. The Alliance supports an advanced, full-featured resolver (N2T) and are creating standardized persistence statements and metadata for describing structured objects via ARK inflections.

Black Beauty Archives

Black Beauty Archives (BBA) mission is to preserve, document and celebrate the history of Black Beauty culture by providing open access to original materials. BBA collects rare beauty magazines, books, cosmetic advertisements, press photos, Black owned cosmetics and Black Cosmetic meme’s to expand the narrative of Black Beauty Culture in America and across the African Diaspora. Their primary goal is access so they prioritize digitization in their work, as well as capturing and collecting oral histories from Black professionals within the Beauty Industry.

University of the District of Columbia

The University of the District of Columbia (UDC) is an institution of higher education that has been in operation since 1851. UDC is vitally important to their community and have long played a role in local African American history. UDC has a large archival collection that they plan to digitize. They are in the process of digitizing our collection as much as time and financial resources allow. UDC focuses on collecting, preserving, and providing access to the history of UDC and its predecessor institutions.

City of La Porte, Texas

The City Secretary’s Office for the City of La Porte, Texas, seeks to provide, enhance, and support the highest records and information management standards and practices appropriate for our organization and to the benefit of our community. The mission of the Office of the City Secretary is to record all actions of the City Council, see to the administration City elections, guarantee the authenticity and provide for the safekeeping and retrieval of all official documents, and the City’s records management program, and fulfill public information requests. The Office of the City Secretary supports the City’s goal of public transparency.

CLOCKSS

CLOCKSS is a community governed and supported digital preservation archive for scholarly content, entrusted with the care of more than 46 million journal articles and 250,000 books plus critical metadata and software. CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) employs a unique approach to archiving (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) that was initiated by Stanford University librarians in 1999. Digital content is stored in the CLOCKSS archive with no user access unless a “trigger” event occurs.

~Nathan Tallman, NDSA Vice Chair

2021 NDSA Membership Survey Report

The Task Force on Membership Engagement is excited to announce the publication of the results of the first 2021 NDSA Membership Survey Report. The 22-question survey was completed by 31 respondents over a 2-week period. This report details the outcomes of the inaugural membership survey that was distributed to members in July 2021. Topics discussed below included, membership benefits analysis, mentorship, member engagement, member satisfaction, and alternative membership models/membership dues.

Some major takeaways from the report include:

Community involvement, access to resources, and educational opportunities were important factors in members’ decisions to join and or continue their membership in NDSA.
Learning about and contributing to digital preservation practices, having decision-making power at the Working Group and Interest Group level (e.g., deciding on work plans and work products), and helping develop community-based durable solutions to a dynamically changing preservation landscape as the most valued membership benefits.
When asking members to rate their membership satisfaction on a scale of 1-5, responses showed that 73% of survey participants were satisfied with membership.

Thank you to all NDSA members who participated in the survey. We appreciate your time and effort spent in providing the information to us.

Thank you to the members of the Task Force on Membership Engagement who worked over the last 10 months to make the report possible.

-Task Force on Membership Engagement