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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!

NDSA Welcomes Three New Members this First Quarter of 2023

As of March 2023, 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! To review our list of all members, you can see them here.

James Madison University

James Madison University Libraries is formally building out their digital preservation program and working closely with AV materials from our Special Collections. They also recognize the pressing need to more strategically engage with web archiving, to capture more fully the complete context of the creative and scholarly activities from our communities. They are developing integrations between their preservation system and their discovery and description systems, and look forward to being part of NDSA to more comprehensively engage with the wider community on these points.

Namibia University of Science and Technology

The Namibia University of Science and Technology Library Digital Collections is responsible for the acquisition, arrangement, description, indexing, storage, disposal, and dissemination of NUST’s historically valuable institutional documents such as study programmes, past exam papers, annual reports, VHS tapes that have been converted to mp4 videos, audio and images taken during NUST events. Through joining the NDSA, they plan to benchmark and explore more ways to ensure long-term preservation and access for this valuable content.

Syracuse University Libraries

While Syracuse University Libraries has been committed to confronting the implications, challenges, and rewards of digital preservation for many years, they have more recently formalized this commitment. In 2021, they established a new Department of Digital Stewardship, which signals both their commitment to digital stewardship in all its forms, providing support to digital scholarship by centering activities of digital production, provision of access, description, object management, and digital preservation. This new department also provides an organizational framework and locus for this activity at Syracuse University Libraries. By joining NDSA, Syracuse University Libraries furthers its commitment and capacity to this work.

NDSA Levels Office Hour April 19th: How do you use the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation?

The NDSA Levels of Preservation Steering Group is interested in finding out how you use the Levels. This information will help others who are using the Levels and may also inform future work.

We hope to gather real life activities from a range of different organizations using the Levels, answering specific questions and scenarios of interest to the community. In March, we released this Google form to start gathering your feedback. Now, we are keeping the conversation going via a live community chat at our next Levels open office hour.

What is your process for using the Levels? How granularly do you use them? How do the Levels fit in with your other certification/assessment work? Do financial or environmental considerations come into your work or processes?

Please join us on April 19^th at 11:30am EST to discuss. We welcome all contributions no matter how big or small!

We look forward to seeing you!

(More details and joining instructions can be found here).

~ The Levels of Preservation Steering Group

How do you use the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation?

The NDSA Levels of Preservation Steering group would like to find out more about particular scenarios in which the Levels are being used. This information will help others who are using the Levels and may also inform future work. Rather than looking for full and detailed case studies, we hope to gather real life activities from a range of different organizations using the Levels answering specific questions and scenarios of interest to the community.

We are interested in the following questions:

How you routinely use the NDSA Levels? – Is it on a regular schedule? Who does it? Who is the information communicated to? What documentation is maintained?
At what level of granularly you use the NDSA Levels? – Do you do just one assessment for all your holdings, or do you do it multiple times for different departments of types of content?
How does the NDSA Levels fit in with the bigger picture of certification and maturity modeling for your organization? – Do you use the Levels alongside other certification standards, maturity models or self-assessment tools? What else do you use and how do these different tools work together to help you move forward?
Are the NDSA Levels used to help project the financial cost of digital preservation? – Do you do this at the level of individual objects, by collection or for the entire repository? How is this information generated? How is it used in program planning? Who contributes to this exercise?
Are environmental considerations are taken into account in your digital preservation work? – How does this impact your use of the Levels?

We welcome contributions no matter how big or small. You are welcome to respond to just one of the scenarios or answer any of the questions that are relevant to you. If multiple scenarios apply to you or your organization, feel free to fill out the form multiple times addressing one question at a time if that is easier.

The information shared with us will be collated and published in a series of themed blog posts. If you wish your contribution to be published anonymously that is fine too!

Please contribute your answers in the Google form by May 1, 2023.

If you would prefer to share your thoughts on any of these questions in a community chat session, we will be hosting our next Levels Office Hour session on this topic on 19th April at 11:30 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada) so do drop in and share your thoughts (more details and joining instructions can be found here).

We very much look forward to hearing from you!

~ The Levels of Preservation Steering Group

Reminder: Call for New Members and Co-Chairs, NDSA Excellence Awards Working Group

The NDSA Excellence Awards Working Group (EAWG) seeks new co-chairs and at-large members! This group relies on volunteer participation from the digital preservation community to publicize the nomination process, review nominations, select the winners, and work closely with the awardees and the DigiPres conference program committee to organize the Awards Ceremony. The group typically meets once a month and works as needed in between regularly scheduled calls to support the awards process. Most work outside of meetings occurs when reviewing applications (2-4 hours), and then in October leading up to the Awards Ceremony (1-2 hours/week). We welcome participation from students and early career professionals, as well as from those who have been in the digital preservation field for a while!

The NDSA Excellence Awards were established in 2012 to highlight and commend all forms of creative and meaningful contributions by individual professionals, future stewards, educators, organizations, projects, and sustainability activities to the field of digital preservation. They offer a wonderful opportunity to learn about the activities and impact of a wide range of exceptional people and projects. Recently, a cooperative agreement was reached with the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) allowing the awards programs for both groups to be presented on an interleaved biennial basis. The NDSA Awards are presented in the odd-numbered years (including this year at DigiPres 2023, in St. Louis on November 15-16, 2023!), while the DPC program takes place in even-numbered years. This provides an opportunity to work with digital preservationists from around the world as a judge on the DPC Digital Preservation Awards in 2024.

Please consider contributing important professional service back to the digital stewardship community. If you would like to join the EAWG, please fill out this form and provide a brief statement of interest. Working group members must be affiliated with an NDSA member institution and agree to follow the NDSA Code of Conduct.

NDSA Digital Preservation Conference (DigiPres23) Call for Proposals

The NDSA is pleased to announce that the Call for Proposals (CFP) is now open for Digital Preservation 2023: Communities of Time and Place (#DigiPres23) to be held November 15-16, 2023 in person in St. Louis, Missouri at the St. Louis Union Station Hotel.

Submissions from members and nonmembers alike are welcome, and you can learn more about session format options through the CFP. The deadline to submit proposals is May 1, 2023 at 11:59 pm Eastern Time. Learn more about the conference itself on the Digital Preservation conference website.

View the CFP and Submit

Digital Preservation 2023 (#DigiPres23) is held in partnership with NDSA’s host organization, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) who is sponsoring a series of events including the 2023 DLF Forum (November 13-15) and associated workshop series Learn@DLF (November 12). CLIR, DLF, and NDSA strive to create a safe, accessible, welcoming, and inclusive event, and adheres to DLF’s Code of Conduct.

We look forward to seeing you at DigiPres23!

~ 2023 DigiPres Planning Committee

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

Call for New Members and Co-Chairs, NDSA Excellence Awards Working Group

The Excellence Awards depend upon the vital volunteer participation of the community. We are looking for new members for the Excellence Awards Working Group (EAWG) at both the co-chair and at-large level. Working group members participate to publicize the nomination process, review nominations, select the winners, and work closely with the awardees and NDSA programming to organize the Awards Ceremony. This group typically meets once a month and works as needed between regularly scheduled calls to support the awards process. Most work outside of meetings occurs when reviewing applications (2-4 hours), and then in October leading up to the Awards Ceremony (1-2 hours/week).

While the NDSA Awards were originally organized on an annual cycle, they are now presented on a biennial basis as the result of a cooperative agreement with the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), which operates their own biennial awards program. The NDSA Awards are presented in the odd-numbered years (including this 2023 year!), while the DPC Awards take place in even-numbered years. NDSA and DPC also provide participation on each other’s Awards panels.

This is a wonderful opportunity to learn about the activities and impact of a wide range of exceptional people and projects. We welcome participation from students and early career professionals, as well as from those who have been in the digital preservation field for a while!

If you would like to help on this working group, please fill out this form by Friday, March 3. Working group members must be affiliated with an NDSA member institution and agree to follow the NDSA Code of Conduct.

Call for Co-chairs for 2023 Storage Survey

NDSA is seeking two volunteers from NDSA member organizations to serve as co-chairs for the next iteration of the Storage Survey. Volunteers should be knowledgeable about, and interested in, digital preservation storage and comfortable with co-leading a group to produce and administer a survey, analyze data, and write and publish a report. Prior experience chairing an NDSA group is not necessary, and NDSA Leadership will provide guidelines for the co-chairs.

Responsibilities include:

Scheduling and leading meetings
Organizing and completing work
Setting deadlines and tracking progress
Attending monthly NDSA Leadership meetings and communicating with Leadership about Working Group progress

The time commitment will vary based on the number of group members and scope of work.

If you’re interested, please fill out this form by February 15, 2023.

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!