Tag: NDSA

2021 DigiPres Recordings Available… and More!

The recordings of the 2021 Digital Preservation Conference: Embracing Digitality are now available as a playlist on the NDSA YouTube Channel! If you missed a session during the conference – or perhaps didn’t have the opportunity to attend – now is your chance to catch up on all the great stuff you may have missed. Many thanks to our DLF conference counterparts for posting these.  

Additionally, a page has been created on the NDSA OSF site called NDSA’s Digital Preservation Conference Links. This will provide a centralized location to find links to past years’ conference materials. This page uses the wiki to link to the slides and recordings of available DigiPres conference sessions.  

Much gratitude to our NDSA community and beyond for making #DigiPres21 one for the books. Stay tuned for more information about the 2022 conference!

 

Onwards and upwards,

Tricia Patterson (2021 Chair) 

Service Opportunities within NDSA

Are you looking to get more involved with NDSA? Do you need to ramp up your service? NDSA is currently recruiting new co-chairs for the Standards & Practices and Content Interest Groups.

Interest Group Co-chairs host regular virtual meetings around topics of interest to NDSA members and the digital curation community, participate in monthly Leadership calls, and contribute to the strategic direction of NDSA. Interest groups may also engage in other activities of interest to members, such as developing educational materials. The NDSA Leadership team works collaboratively and provides support for interest group development. Terms are typically two years and are renewable. You can find out more about being a co-chair at Co-Chairing and NDSA Group.

The Standards and Practices Interest Group works to facilitate a broad understanding of the role and benefit of standards in digital preservation and how to use them effectively to ensure durable and usable collections. The Content Interest Group explores a broad array of topics related to preserving digital content, including: viable approaches to institutional collaboration; sharing strategies to address issues of scale and complexity; and the development of policies, practices, and community action to promote ethical and sustainable labor for digital stewardship.

If you’re interested in becoming a co-chair, please contact the current co-chairs to let them know. Any member of NDSA Leadership would be happy to answer any questions!

Standards & Practice: Felicity Dykas (DykasF [at] MISSOURI [dot] EDU)

Content: Brenda Burk (bburk [at] clemson [dot] edu) and Deb Verhoff (deb [dot] verhoff [at] nyu [dot] edu)

~ Nathan Tallman
NSDA Chair

NDSA Year in Review

Happy New Year! 

As we begin 2022 we wanted to take a moment to look back at what we’ve done over the past year.  One of the big shifts the Leadership team made was starting to review membership applications quarterly – welcoming a total of 23 new members in January, March, June, September, December.  More about this process is available on the NDSA membership website along with details for how existing members can learn how to keep their contact information up to date.

Interest Groups

The three NDSA Interest Groups continued to meet on a monthly basis.  A summary of their activities follows: 

Content Interest Group

The Content Interest Group hosts a monthly call for NDSA members who are interested in preservation activities broadly related to content. Recent calls focused on topics around ethical work practices, email preservation and making a shift from bit level preservation to content based decision making. 

This past year, we’ve been experimenting with the format for these calls. For Content Exchanges, we invite members to lead us in a conversation about a topic of interest to the group. Sometimes they have experience to draw from and sometimes, we are exploring new territory together. We look for ways to engage in dialogue in order to learn from one another and make connections that might further our work or scholarship. In another series, Sharing Scholarship, we invite members to present their research in early stages in order to gather feedback and identify partners when possible.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure Interest Group spent 2021 both continuing as we have in the past by hosting presentations on topics of interest, as well as investigating new ways to meet group members’ needs. We held several meetings where we invited meeting attendees to bring their challenges and questions to the group to be discussed and to get suggestions for solutions.  These topics ranged from discussing datasets, shifting to using cloud infrastructure, collection policies, and dynamically adjusting collection storage infrastructures. In our more topic focused meetings, the group covered: 

  • Fixity in the cloud
  • The Oxford Common File Layout (OFCL)
  • Information security
  • The environmental impact of digital preservation
  • Exploring characterization
  • Experience with RDM (research data management) systems
  • DNA storage for digital preservation

Standards and Practices Group

The Standards and Practices Interest Group focused on standards for policies for digital preservation during 2021. We reviewed policies libraries and other cultural heritage institutions have posted online, identified categories of topics covered, and developed an outline of those. Following that, we worked as a group to create a template that includes sample texts taken from the policies and added sample text to fill in gaps. 

In addition to that focused work, meetings were used for round robin updates, and questions from attendees. The networking aspect of meetings is useful in sharing Covid protocols from different institutions, as well as modifications made to workflows. Also, questions and subsequent discussions provided continuing education as we heard how different organizations handle their work. The mix of new and more experienced members from a variety of institutions provided for a rich experience.

Working Groups

NDSA Working groups were once again busy this year with work being conducted by the Digipres Conference Organizing Committee and Excellence Awards Committee, the Fixity Survey Working Group, the publishing of the Good Migrations Checklist, additional translations of the Levels of Digital Preservation, a Membership Task Force Survey and Report, the Staffing Survey Working Group, and the formation of the Web Archiving Working Group.  Highlights of the work of these groups can be found below: 

DigiPres Conference Organizing Committee

  • The 2021 DigiPres conference was hosted virtually on Thursday, November 4th 2021 – on World Digital Preservation Day! Since 2016, the conference has been held in conjunction with DLF Forum and Learn@DLF, but this was the second year our community convened online, paving the way for record numbers of proposal submissions and registrants. A recap of the event, including links to the proceedings, can be found on the DigiPres 2021 NDSA web page.  Session recordings will be out shortly.
  • Recordings from the 2020 conference were made available in early 2021

NDSA Excellence Awards Committee 

  • In 2021 the awards were renamed as the Excellence Awards to highlight and commend all forms of creative and meaningful contributions by individuals, projects, sustainability activities, organizations, future stewards, and educators to the field of digital preservation.  Awards focus on recognizing excellence in the following areas: Individual Award, Project Award, Sustainability Award, Organization Award, Future Steward Award and the Educator Award.  Information about the awards and current and past winners is available on the NDSA website.  

Fixity Survey

  • The NDSA Fixity Survey originally run in 2017 was rerun in 2021.  A call for participation went out in March, the survey was available to the public in May, and the survey results were published in November.  The Fixity Survey is expected to be completed every four years. 

Good Migrations Checklist Published

  • The Good Migrations Checklist provides a checklist for what you will want to do or think through before and after moving digital materials and metadata forward to a new digital preservation system/infrastructure.  The checklist also uses the technical framework of the functional areas of the Levels of Digital Preservation.  

Levels of Digital Preservation

  • There were three new translations (Arabic, Finnish, and German) done for the Levels of DIgital Preservation in the past year, bringing the total number of languages the matrix and other Levels documents are translated to seven.  
  • The Levels Steering group also assisted the Teaching Advocacy and Outreach subgroup in publishing a set of teaching materials about the Levels.  

Membership Task Force

  • NDSA Leadership initiated a Membership Task force in early 2021 in order to learn more about how members felt about their membership and what they may be expecting or interested in for the future.  A call for participation was made in February and the report based on the survey responses was published in December.  

Staffing Survey

  • The NDSA Staffing Survey was run in 2013 and 2017. A call for participation in the next iteration was made in March of 2021. The Staffing Survey working group spent much of the year discussing and revising the survey questions and goals, before releasing the survey for responses in November. In the past, the survey requested only one response per organization. This time, in order to get a wider set of responses and a new view of staffing situations, any individual could answer the survey and multiple people from the same organization could participate. The survey has been closed and the group will be analyzing the results in early 2022.

Web Archiving Survey 

  • Upon the NDSA Leaderships review of surveys as a whole, the Web Archiving survey was also due for the next iteration in 2021.  A request for participation in this group was sent out in October and the group has formed and has begun working on the survey.  Please keep your eyes out for the survey in 2022.  

 

Thank you!

Thank you to all of our members for taking time to participate in the many surveys and activities over the years.  We appreciate the time spent and look forward to continuing to work together.

 

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

Call for Volunteers for the NDSA DigiPres 2022 Planning Committee

The NDSA calls for volunteers to join our Planning Committee for Digital Preservation 2022.

Digital Preservation (DigiPres) is the NDSA’s annual conference – open to members and non-members alike – focused on stewardship, curation, and preservation of digital information and cultural heritage. The 2022 meeting will take place on October 12-13, 2022, in Baltimore, Maryland, just after the DLF Forum. 

NDSA is an affiliate of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Digital Library Federation (DLF), and the DigiPres conference is held in concert with the annual DLF Forum. CLIR continues to monitor the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and after successfully pivoting to a virtual format for 2020 and 2021, we are hoping to be back to a version of in-person conferencing for 2022. 

Planning Committee responsibilities include:

  • Defining a vision for the conference
  • Crafting and distributing a Call for Proposals
  • Reviewing and selecting proposals
  • Identifying a keynote speaker
  • Determining the conference schedule
  • Moderating sessions
  • Supporting membership through recruitment and mentorship efforts
  • Collaborating with the DLF Forum planning committee on community events, equity and inclusion, and sponsorship opportunities

We expect to have monthly group calls from January-November, with some periods being busier than others. For instance, in the months of May-June 2022, there will be an uptick in the work during the period where we create the schedule as it requires concentrated effort.

Join us by completing this form by Friday, January 14th, and please share widely.

We look forward to working with you!

~ Jes Neal, 2022 Chair

~ Stacey Erdman, 2022 Vice-Chair/2023 Chair

Announcing Member Contact Update Form and Update on Membership Status

NDSA membership contacts are the main point of contact if questions arise about the NDSA membership. These people also receive emails about the annual Coordinating Committee election and any other official correspondence the NDSA Leadership may have. To help keep these contacts up to date, the NDSA has been working on developing a way for organizations to let us know when their Program Representative or Authorized Signatory contact needs to be updated. We have developed a form for you to fill out to provide us with correct information.  

To assist NDSA with managing memberships, emails from contacts that bounce back more than once from organizations with multiple contacts will be automatically removed from the membership contact list. Effort will be made to reach out to organizations without multiple contacts that have emails bouncing back, however if no response is received NDSA reserves the right to remove this organization from the current membership list until such time as the organization is able to provide new contacts.

If you would like to know who your contacts are please reach out to ndsa.digipres [at] gmail.com and we will be happy to provide you with that information.  

This information, instructions, and the form are also available on the Member Orientation webpage. There is also a link to the form on the Join the NDSA webpage.  

~ The NDSA Leadership Team

It’s here, the 2021 NDSA Staffing Survey!

Do you work at an organization that stewards digital content for long-term preservation? If so, we’d like to hear from you about staffing for digital preservation at your organization. The 2021 NDSA Staffing Survey is designed to gain insight into current and ideal staffing for digital preservation programs. 

The 2021 Staffing Survey is meant to be answered by individuals and there is no limit on the number of individual respondents per organization. Responses are sought from individuals worldwide with current digital preservation responsibilities at their organization, ranging from practitioners to department managers to senior leadership. You do not need to be an NDSA member to answer this survey.

Follow this link to access the survey. It is available until Friday, December 10, 2021 and is expected to take approximately 20-25 minutes to complete. To assist with completing the survey, a PDF preview of all of the survey questions can be viewed in advance by following this link.

The 2021 survey has undergone an extensive redesign from the earlier 2012 and 2017 iterations, prompted by findings from the last survey and changes in the field over the last decade. During this process, the Staffing Survey Working Group aimed to ensure that all participants would see themselves reflected in the answer choices. While the survey is not exhaustive, we believe it strikes a balance. However, we welcome all feedback about how future instances of the survey can be improved, and encourage participants to submit their comments at the survey’s end.

Interested in the results of previous NDSA staffing reports? The code books, data, and reports are available in the NDSA OSF.

If you have questions or concerns about this survey, please contact ndsa.digipres@gmail.com and include “Staffing Survey” in the subject line.

Thank you for helping NDSA and our community define and advance digital preservation!

-The NDSA Staffing Survey Working Group

Results of the 2021 Fixity Survey and Fixity Case Studies

The 2021 Fixity Survey Working Group is pleased to announce the publication of the results of the 2021 Fixity Survey and corresponding Fixity Case Studies.  The 40 question survey was completed by 116 respondents over a month long period.  

The Report documents the results of each question in the areas of 1) basic information about fixity practices, 2) how fixity is being used, 3) fixity in relation to cloud services, 4) fixity errors, and 5) general demographic information.  

Several key points can be made from studying the survey results, some of which are listed below with more details provided in the report. 

  • The results demonstrate just how important fixity information is to the digital preservation community, with over 96% of survey respondents confirming that they utilize fixity information within their organization and over 98% of these using checksums (sometimes alongside other types of fixity information). The primary reason fixity information is used by the community is to determine whether data has been altered over time.
  • Despite a clear consensus that the use of fixity information represents good practice, the results demonstrate huge variation in fixity practices across the community. There are a variety of practices reported across the survey questions, including at what point fixity information is verified, the frequency of checks, where fixity information is recorded, and the checksum algorithms in use. 
  • Receiving fixity information at the time of acquisition remains a challenge.
  • Though fixity checking lends itself well to automation, for many it remains a fairly manual process, with a majority of respondents using manually-run software to carry out this activity. 

In addition to analyzing the results of the survey, the Fixity Survey Working Group conducted follow-up interviews with five organizations to explore fixity practices in more detail. Case studies from four of these organizations are currently included in the report and provide a rich illustration of how fixity is used within specific organizations, and build on some of the findings of the survey itself.

You can read and/or download the Report, Data files, and Codebook from the NDSA OSF site.  

Thank you to all of you 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 Fixity Survey Working group who worked on a tight schedule to complete this work in time for DigiPres.  

~ The 2021 Fixity Survey Working Group co-chairs

Request for Participation in the Web Archiving Survey Working Group

Re-launched in 2021, the Web Archiving Survey Working Group plans to conduct a survey of organizations in the United States and beyond that are actively involved in, or interested in starting, programs to archive content from the Web. This survey, to be published in 2022, will build on previous iterations of the ‘Web Archiving in the United States’ surveys, published in 2017, 2016, 2013, and 2011. 

Before work begins in earnest, the Web Archiving Survey Working Group co-chairs, Zakiya Collier and Samantha Abrams, are seeking 3-4 additional Working Group volunteers to review previous surveys and design a new survey, publish the survey and collect responses, review the responses and write the report, and present results and work at upcoming conferences. Volunteers should represent a range of institutions, types, and locations, and will explicitly include one student (or a recent graduate) working towards their Master’s degree in Library and Information Studies in order to engage them with the NDSA and its members.

It’s estimated that joining the Web Archiving Survey Working Group will be a 9 month commitment (4-5 hours of work per month), with work beginning in December 2021.

Those interested in serving should complete this form by Friday, November 12: https://forms.gle/BxDBcbatMjRC3eyG6. Co-chairs will review the responses and reach out with next steps soon thereafter.

Questions? Please email Samantha Abrams and Zakiya Collier at ndsa-web-archiving@googlegroups.com.

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