Tag: NDSA

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.

DigiPres 2021 Keynote Speaker: Dr. Tonia Sutherland!

We are pleased to announce Dr. Tonia Sutherland Dr. Tonia Sutherland headshotas the keynote speaker for Digital Preservation 2021: Embracing Digitality (#DigiPres21). Dr. Sutherland is an Assistant Professor in the Library and Information Sciences Program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa where her work focuses on memory, community, and technology. Dr. Sutherland’s book Digital Remains is forthcoming from the University of California Press. Since she will be joining us for the virtual event from Hawaiʻi, her keynote address, titled “After the Archives: On Living and Dying in Digital Culture,” will take place halfway through the program as a plenary session.

For more information on Dr. Sutherland’s keynote talk – or to explore the rest of the DigiPres program and affiliated events – be sure to review the program schedule.

Conference Details and Registration Information

NDSA Welcomes Eight New Members

As of 17 September 2021, the NDSA Leadership unanimously voted to welcome its eight 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.

Botanical Research Institute of Texas

The Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BIRT) was founded with an institutional commitment to the preservation and dissemination of botanical knowledge. BRIT’s core collection is the Herbarium which holds almost 1.5 million preserved plant specimens. Approximately 70% of this collection has been digitally imaged and is continually growing through ongoing digitization efforts. These specimen images and data are disseminated through data portals such as TORCH and SERNEC and preserved through partnerships with the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas and CyVerse.

Oklahoma State University Library

The Oklahoma State University Library has been dedicated to digital preservation for over two decades, beginning with efforts to preserve and make accessible online Charles Kappler’s Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Digital preservation efforts were first enacted by the Library’s Electronic Publishing Center (EPC, 2000-2008), but larger initiatives were soon in place throughout the Library. Another major contributor in the digital preservation area has been the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program, which was founded in 2007 and has been fully digital since its inception.

NYC Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS)

The New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) manages formats dating 1640-2020 and 500 TB of both digitized and born digital material. A team of 8 permanent staff are dedicated to digitizing collections at a growth rate of 150TB per year. DORIS is preparing to ingest ~200 TB of born digital government material with the mayoral changeover in January 2022. Since 2017, DORIS has used BitCurator for reviewing and ingesting born-digital content from city agencies. 

Amistad Research Center

The Amistad Research Center (ARC) has been digitizing archives and manuscripts, photographs and text for online access and digital exhibitions for a number of years. In partnership with Adam Matthews Digital and other library vendors, one record collection has been digitized with interest in digitizing other collections housed here. Additionally, ARC established over the last decade a robust audiovisual reformatting program with the ability to digitize most audio and some video formats in house, while outsourcing film collections or U-matic videotapes as funding is acquired. ARC is now exploring long-term cloud storage solutions for our high quality access and digital master files, as well as the funding required to maintain such storage.

University of Dubuque Charles C. Myers Library 

The Charles C. Myers Library manages its preservation environment using open-source, on-site, and off-site, and cloud technologies. The library curates digital exhibitions featuring  minority populations in the aviation field and underrepresented groups on campus over the last 100 years at the university.

University of Arkansas at Fayetteville Libraries

At the University of Arkansas Fayetteville Libraries there are two units that participate in various levels of digital preservation. The Digital Services Department provides various stage levels of digital preservation depending on the collection scope and grant agreements for digitization.  Special Collections, which also houses the University Archives, performs a detailed digital preservation process.

The African American Research Library and Cultural Center 

The Broward County African American Research Library and Cultural Center (AARLCC) is a public research library. Their digitization and digital preservation efforts hope to create access and awareness of content in their collection which focuses on Black history and life. AARLCC is also using 3D scanning for artifacts. As a Black collecting library and archive, another area of interest is the work of web archiving for Black collecting institutions. AARLCC has co-created the Archiving the Black Web initiative to support efforts of similar Black collecting organizations and to begin to document and preserve content on the web related to Black history and life.

Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Canada 

The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph is a consolidated archive committed to following best practices in ensuring both born-digital records received through transfer or donation and analogue records which have been digitized for preservation or outreach purposes, are preserved long-term. The Congregation has built an in-house digital preservation system using free and open source software, following the OAIS model and strives to achieve the highest NDSA levels of preservation over time.

~Nathan Tallman, NDSA Vice Chair

Catching up with past NDSA Innovation Awards Winners: Dorothea Salo

In 2017, Dorothea Salo received the NDSA Innovation Award in the Educators category for her development projects, RADD (Recovering Analog and Digital Data), PROUD (Portable Recovery of Unique Data), and PRAVDA (Portably Reformat Audio and Video to Digital from Analog). These projects were designed to extend the reach of digitization and preservation tools to those without the resources of large-scale memory institutions. Today, she is a Distinguished Faculty Associate in The Information School at University of Wisconsin-Madison and took some time to offer us an update on these projects, her work, and her plans.

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

A little bit of everything, as always! The iSchool is in a time of significant change, from joining the brand-new Computer, Data, and Information Sciences division to hiring several new faculty to launching an entire new MS Information degree. I’ve been building and teaching a bunch of new courses, working with a peerless team of co-investigators on the Data Doubles research project, doing solo work on library privacy, teaching for the Digital POWRR workshop series… and, of course, surviving (knock on wood) the COVID pandemic. Right now I’m teaching an undergraduate computer-science course, the first time I ever have.

What did receiving the NDSA award mean to you?

Paraphrasing my favorite actress from my favorite movie: “it makes me feel as though my hard work ain’t been in vain for nothin’.” Quixotic solo projects like RADD can absolutely feel frustratingly pointless at times. I can’t say enough about how much I appreciated recognition from a group of people as wise, experienced, and pragmatic as NDSA. Bless you all!

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

Oooh, let me check my Pinboard… I definitely think the Oxford Common File Layout and the Portland Common Data Model are valiant and worthwhile attempts to solve real issues in an efficient and effective way. I’m always grateful for NARA’s work, like their Digital Preservation Framework on GitHub. The revised NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation are terrific. On a lighter note, I also really appreciate the Australasia Preserves and Digital Preservation Coalition YouTube channels for their karaoke takes on preservation. They’re so fun and great!

How have the RADD, PROUD, and PRAVDA projects evolved since you won the Innovation Award? 

Less than I wish they had – I just haven’t had the time or the strength. I have managed to get several pieces of equipment properly overhauled and repaired, which given that I have no dedicated or reliable budget and repairs are expensive is a feat. (Of course as soon as I say this – I have three Digital8 cameras that are all aggravatingly broken in different ways…) I’ve gotten some projects done for folks, though the pandemic made that extra-difficult. The PROUD and PRAVDA kits did a fair bit of traveling (including by air) and demos pre-pandemic, and they have held up like troupers. I couldn’t know in advance how well that would work, so I’m pleased to say that it’s been fine, no equipment casualties whatever. 

What I’m really rethinking now is the project model. I’ve demonstrated to my own dissatisfaction that I can’t manage RADD well as an all-comers rescue service: there isn’t enough of me, digitizing A/V takes too long, equipment breaks unpredictably, when the rig is in use I can’t take it out of service to improve it, and random-project work is too unpredictable to schedule. I’m tentatively thinking about an approach with a few more guardrails that provides more and better opportunities for iSchool students to get to know RADD and work with it.

What do you currently see as some of the biggest challenges in digitization and preservation for smaller memory institutions? 

You know, there was a time I would reflexively have yelled “funding!” in response to this question. Don’t get me wrong, funding is absolutely still a big obstacle! But the obstacle behind the funding obstacle, I think, is ignorance about what this work actually requires – everybody’s ignorance, from the general public to journalists to funders to legislators… all the way to actual information professionals. 

I went completely ballistic a couple of years back over a painfully ignorant, wrongheaded, and condescending article in Wired that came out shortly after the devastating Brazil national-museum fire, an article calling blithely for a “digital backup of cultural memory” with absolutely zero understanding of the magnitude and cost of such an undertaking. We can’t possibly get the funding to do the work we desperately have to do until there is a general understanding of very basic phenomena such as “audio and video digitize in real time.” 

Info pros don’t always make this better. I was told by a Digital POWRR participant that in some formal continuing education they’d done, the instructor, a respected archivist, had told them it was impossible to rescue data off digital media without a multi-thousand-dollar FRED device. If that’s what that archivist actually said (and it may not be, human memory being fragile)… it’s nonsense! PROUD rescues data from several common types of digital media at a small fraction of the cost of a FRED, and far more portably! This just breaks my heart, because when learners go home thinking they’ll never have the equipment budget, data will die of neglect. I built RADD, PROUD, and PRAVDA because I didn’t think it has to be this way. I still don’t!

 

NDSA Announces 2021 Slate of Candidates for Coordinating Committee

NDSA is happy to announce the 2021 slate of Coordinating Committee (CC) candidates. Elections will soon be held for three (3) CC members.  The CC is dedicated to ensuring a strategic direction for NDSA, to the advancement of NDSA activities to achieve community goals, and to further communication among digital preservation professionals and NDSA member organizations. The CC is responsible for reviewing and approving NDSA membership applications and publications; updating eligibility standards for membership in the alliance, and other strategic documents; engaging with stakeholders in the community; and working to enroll new members committed to our core mission. The successful candidates will each serve a three year term. Ballots will be sent to membership organization contacts in the coming weeks.

Stacey Erdman

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 would work 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.

Daniel Johnson

Daniel Johnson is the Digital Preservation Librarian at The University of Iowa and Consulting Archivist for The HistoryMakers. Previously Johnson worked as a digital archivist at The HistoryMakers and as a project archivist for the Gordon Hall and Grace Hoag Collection of Extremist and Dissenting Printed Propaganda at Brown University. Johnson has experience working in digital preservation, digital archives, reformatting/digitization, digital file management, web archiving, metadata standards, database management and project management. Johnson has presented on digital preservation related topics at many conferences including the American Library Association, the Society of American Archivist, the Digital Library Federation and the Upper Midwest Digital Collections Conference. Johnson earned his B.A. degree in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007 and his MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009.

Jen Mitcham

Jen Mitcham has been working in the field of digital preservation for 17 years after an early career as an archaeologist. Her data preservation work began at the Archaeology Data Service where she worked on the preservation of a range of different types of datasets, including databases, laser scan data and Geographic Information Systems, also developing front ends for online access. At the Archaeology Data Service, she led a successful application for the Data Seal of Approval (now CoreTrustSeal) and was involved in the ‘Big Data Project’. From here she moved to the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York where she focused on establishing policy and procedures for both digital preservation and digitisation. Here she was heavily involved in research data management, both as a facilitator in training sessions for researchers and in working on a preservation infrastructure. She led the Jisc funded project ‘Filling the Digital Preservation Gap’ which was a finalist in the Research and Innovation category of the 2016 Digital Preservation Awards. She currently holds the post of Head of Good Practice and Standards at the Digital Preservation Coalition and has been working closely with the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority over the last two years on a digital preservation project. As part of this work, she has been involved in the development of a new maturity model for digital preservation called the Rapid Assessment Model and chairs a task force with a focus on the preservation of records from Electronic Document and Records Management Systems. She works with Coalition Members internationally to help facilitate collaboration and communication in the field of digital preservation. Jen has been involved in several NDSA efforts, including the NDSA Levels Revision working group., NDSA Level Steering group, the Standards and Practices interest group, and the Fixity Survey working group.

Hannah Wang

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 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is interested in joining the Coordinating Committee because she wants to advance the NDSA as an educational and advocacy resource for practitioners, particularly students and early-career professionals. She is also interested in exploring how the NDSA can align itself with the activities of other communities working toward the common goal of advancing digital stewardship practice through collaboration and knowledge exchange.

Arabic Translations Available of the 2019 Levels of Digital Preservation

The NDSA is pleased to announce that the 2019 Levels of Preservation documents have been translated into Arabic by our colleagues from Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation’s Qirab project (http://thesaurus-islamicus.org/index.htm).

Translations for the Levels of Digital Preservation Matrix and Implementation Guide were completed.

Links to these documents are found on the 2019 Levels of Digital Preservation OSF site (https://osf.io/qgz98/).

If you would be interested in translating the Levels of Digital Preservation V2.0 into another language please contact us at ndsa.digipres@gmail.com.

الترجمات العربيَّة لمستويات الحفظ لعام 2019 والوثائق المرتبطة بها

يسرُّ الاتحاد الوطني للإشراف الرقمي أن يُعلنَ عن صدور ترجمة باللغة العربيَّة لوثائق مستويات الحفظ الرقمي لعام 2019، نفَّذها زملاؤنا من مشروع «قِرَاب» التابع لجمعية المكنز الإسلامي.

(http://thesaurus-islamicus.org)

 

وقد اكتملت التَّرجمات الخاصة بمصفوفة ودليل تنفيذ مستويات الحفظ الرقمي.

علمًا أنه يمكن الوصولُ إلى تلك الوثائق من خلال مستويات الحفظ الرقمي لعام 2019 في الموقع الإلكتروني الخاص بمؤسسة أوبن ساينس فريم ورك (OSF).

(https://osf.io/qgz98)

وفي حالة اهتمامكم بترجمة الإصدار الثاني من مستويات الحفظ الرقمي إلى لغةٍ أخرى، يُرجى التواصلُ معنا عبر عنوان البريد الإلكتروني التالي: ndsa.digipres@gmail.com

Call for Nominations to the NDSA Coordinating Committee

NDSA will be electing three members to its Coordinating Committee (CC) this year, with terms starting in January 2022. CC members serve a three year term, participate in a monthly call, and meet at the annual Digital Preservation Conference. The Coordinating Committee provides strategic leadership to the organization in coordination with group co-chairs. NDSA is a diverse community with a critical mission, and we seek candidates to join the CC that bring a variety of cultures and orientations, skills, perspectives and experiences, to bear on leadership initiatives. Working on the CC is an opportunity to contribute your leadership for the community as a whole, while collaborating with a wonderful group of dynamic and motivated professionals. 

If you are interested in joining the NDSA Coordinating Committee (CC) or want to nominate another member, please complete the nomination form by 11:59pm EDT Friday, August 13, 2021 11:59pm EDT Friday, August 20, 2021, which asks for the name, e-mail address, brief bio/candidate statement (nominee-approved), and NDSA-affiliated institution of the nominee. We particularly encourage and welcome nominations of people from underrepresented groups and sectors. 

As members of the NDSA, we join together to form a consortium of more than 260 partnering organizations, including businesses, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, professional associations and universities, all engaged in the long-term preservation of digital information. Committed to preserving access to our national digital heritage, we each offer our diverse skills, perspectives, experiences, cultures and orientations to achieve what we could not do alone. 

The CC is dedicated to ensuring a strategic direction for NDSA, to the advancement of NDSA activities to achieve community goals, and to further communication among digital preservation professionals and NDSA member organizations. The CC is responsible for reviewing and approving NDSA membership applications and publications; updating eligibility standards for membership in the alliance, and other strategic documents; engaging with stakeholders in the community; and working to enroll new members committed to our core mission. More information about the duties and responsibilities of CC members can be found at the NDSA’s Leadership Page.

We hope you will give this opportunity serious consideration and we value your continued contributions and leadership in our community.

Any questions can be directed to ndsadigipres@gmail.com.  

Thank you,

Nathan Tallman, Vice Chair
On behalf of the NDSA Coordinating Committee

Catching up with past NDSA Innovation Awards Winners: ePADD

Nominations are now being accepted for the NDSA 2021 Excellence Awards.

In 2017, ePADD won the NDSA Innovation Award in the Project category. At that time, this project was an undertaking to develop free and open-source computational analysis software that facilitates screening, browsing, and access for historically and culturally significant email collections. The software incorporates techniques from computer science and computational linguistics, including natural language processing, named entity recognition, and other statistical machine-learning associated processes. Glynn Edwards accepted the award on behalf of the project. She is currently the Assistant Director in the Department of Special Collections & University Archives at Stanford University and kindly took a few minutes to help us catch up on where the project stands today.

What have you been doing since receiving an NDSA Innovation Award in 2017?

We completed two additional phases of software development for ePADD. Phase 2, funded by the Institute of Museum & Library Studies (IMLS) National Leadership Grant (NLG) and Phase 3, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These rounds of development focused on adding new features and functionality to the software to support the appraisal, processing, discovery, and delivery of email collections of historic value. Our project team also changed before this third phase with Sally DeBauche, our new digital archivist, taking over project management full-time for 18 months. 

Before Phase 3 launched in January 2020 with Harvard Library as our official partner, Jessica Smith, Ian Gifford, and Jochen Farwer from the University of Manchester contacted us about their own independent project to redevelop aspects of ePADD. They created a prototype version of ePADD that would display a full-text email archive in the Discovery Module, allowing users to view an email collection online. 

Meetings with the Harvard team, represented by Tricia Patterson & Stephen Abrams, progressed to the proposal of ceasing the redevelopment of their in-house email processing and preservation software, EAS, and instead collaborating with us to add specific preservation functionality to ePADD. At this stage, we brought the team from the University of Manchester into those discussions to help us shape the requirements for a new version of ePADD with greater support for preservation workflows. Concurrently with our Phase 3 grant, our three institutions began working on a joint grant proposal for Phase 4 of ePADD’s software development, funded by the University of Illinois’s Email Archives: Building Capacity and Community (EA:BCC) re-grant program, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We have been meeting together for the past year as we document requirements, identify roles and responsibilities for each of our units to carry out this work. For this phase of the project, we have contracted with an independent software development team, Sartography, to implement changes to the software, while retaining ePADD’s original development team to ensure consistency in our approach.

Internally at Stanford, we continue to use ePADD as our production tool for appraising, processing, and delivering email archives at Stanford. Our digital archives team, Sally DeBauche & Annie Schweikert, have presented on the software to our group of curators and have been in contact with them about appraising and processing new acquisitions. Annie & Sally have processed several new email collections, including the Ted Nelson email archive and the Don Knuth email archive. We have also launched a new multi-institutional online ePADD Discovery website at epadd.org, featuring the archive of literary critic and historical theorist, Hayden White, from the UC Santa Cruz archives. To accompany the site, we have created documentation about contributing to the Discovery site. 

What did receiving the NDSA award mean to you?

Beyond the recognition of our colleagues, it raised the profile of the ePADD software which garnered more users and interest. This greater following gave us the impetus for our third grant from the Mellon Foundation and allowed us to create a more stable program that can be used as a production tool for email archives.

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

There has been a lot of development in the field since we started with the ePADD project. But I have been very impressed with the EaaSI project (emulation), for which Stanford serves as a node host. This project will be a game changer for our stakeholders across the university and beyond, as well as colleagues throughout the library who use this platform to provide access to legacy software and files that rely on unique and outdated software.

How has the ePADD project evolved since you won the Innovation Award?

I included a lot of this in #1 above – but I would add that the raised profile and increased interest and use of ePADD, has brought dedicated partners. The Stanford-Harvard-Manchester partnership began during our third grant and has increased exposure of ePADD+ (as we now refer to it) and with the greater involvement from colleagues at each institution has allowed the larger team to focus on different aspects of running and managing the project. One exciting outcome is the commitment of more software testers and greater input from a wider community.

What do you currently see as some of the biggest challenges in email assessment and preservation?

While I am still hoping for a more holistic way to search across all types of archival content, I think that sustainability is one of the major issues facing open-source software development projects. The cost of bug-fixes and updates with new versions of underlying programs might not always be inordinate, but securing dedicated funding is not simple and is often very time consuming. Even more difficult is getting concrete buy-in for funds needed to pay developers to create significant enhancements. We are excited to see the progress from the It Takes a Village in Practice project that aims to provide guidance to open-source software development projects on sustainability. We are engaged in beta testing for the tools that they are developing, and it will be very interesting to see how they can be of service to the broader community.

Levels of Preservation Teaching, Advocacy, and Outreach Update

The Levels of Preservation Steering Group is pleased to announce the official release of its first round of training support materials for those who want to teach and educate others in the Levels of Preservation. This has been the product of many months’ refinement and editing – not to mention lots of wordsmithing! Our heartfelt thanks go out to Nance McGovern (MIT) and the rest of the TAO group for their hard work on this project.

The training support packet includes a comprehensive slide deck packed with information as well as a guide for users to help determine the relevant components of the slide for any style of presentation. The deck can be edited and repurposed to suit your needs or audience. Slides could be used for a full day workshop, a webinar, or just a quick infomercial like presentation. The guide helps break down which slides may be most useful for each type of presentation, however feel free to use the slides that work for your purpose or audience. We simply ask that you cite NDSA as the source as noted in the deck.

The materials (as well as a whole host of other NDSA publications) can be found here: https://osf.io/je439/

~ Bradley J. Daigle; Chair, Levels Steering Working Group

NDSA Adds Three New Members

As of 8 June 2021, 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. UCLA is the largest digital library in the University of California system and collects every format, they collect, preserve, and publish petabytes of data. The Crowley Company has provided commercial and archival digitization and micrographic services for those needing to digitally preserve content since 1980. Matthew Breitbart, NDSA’s first Affiliate Member, is an expert at FADGI standards and an M-19-21-SME who has worked with digital information in museums and the private sector.

Each organization participates in one or more of the various interest and working groups – so 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.

~ Nathan Tallman, NDSA Vice Chair

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