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Catching up with past NDSA Excellence Awards Winners: Tessa Walsh

The NDSA Individual Excellence Award honors individuals making significant contributions to the digital preservation community. In 2019, Tessa Walsh was one of two awardees in this category. Tessa has created an evolving suite of robust open source tools meeting many core needs of the stewardship community in appraising, processing, and reporting upon born-digital collections. At the time of the award, her projects included the Brunnhilde characterization tool; BulkReviewer, for identifying PII and other sensitive information; the METSFlask viewer for Archivematica METS files; SCOPE, an access interface for Archivematica dissemination information packages; and CCA Tools, for creating submission packages from a variety of folder and disk image sources. Taken together, these tools support a very wide gamut of both technical and curatorial activities.

We recently caught up with Tessa to chat about the Excellence Awards. Read on to hear more about what Tessa has been working on recently!

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

I’ve been busy! Other than the whole global pandemic bit, I shifted from an archivist/librarian coding off the side of my desk to a professional software developer working on open source digital preservation tools, which has been a dream.

From March 2020 (the same week lockdown started here in Montreal) to September 2022, I worked as a Software Developer at Artefactual Systems, primarily on the Archivematica and Access to Memory (AtoM) projects. Getting a chance to grow leaps and bounds as a developer while working on open source software that the digital preservation and archival communities are heavily invested in was a dream come true. And as anyone who has had the chance to work with the folks at Artefactual will know, it’s a really supportive environment filled with kind, curious, multi-skilled people. I’m proud of some of the features I was able to work on there, including implementing an storage adapter for Archivematica to work with nearly any cloud storage provider, adding single sign-on to Archivematica and AtoM, helping users with their migration and theming projects, and working on some supplementary tools for things like reporting and audit logging.

In September 2022, I took a new role as Senior Applications and Tools Engineer at Webrecorder. Getting to work on a friendly and talented small team developing user-friendly open source solutions to challenging problems in web archiving has been fantastic. Since starting at Webrecorder, I’ve made contributions to pywb and Browsertrix Crawler, and have been heavily involved in the development of Browsertrix Cloud, a new open source cloud-native browser-based crawling service that unifies several Webrecorder tools into a single easy-to-use web application for creating, managing, curating, and sharing web archives. We’ve been hard at work developing both the software as well as a sustainable open source business model around it, and will be launching a hosted service as well as support models for the open source software in the coming months and year. It’s a really exciting time to be at Webrecorder, and I’m excited for us to continue furthering Webrecorder’s mission of web archiving for all.

I’ve also kept developing and maintaining a small set of my own open source projects, including putting out several releases of Bulk Reviewer (https://github.com/bulk-reviewer/bulk-reviewer/), a desktop application that aids users in finding and managing private and sensitive information in digital archives that is now included in the BitCurator Environment.

Finally, I’ve had the pleasure of being involved in a few research projects that I hope are helping to push forward thinking on topics that are of special interest to me. With Keith Pendergrass, Walker Sampson, and Laura Alagna, I published the paper “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation” in American Archivist in late 2019, which explores the environmental impact of digital preservation practice and suggests ways for the field to move forward in a more sustainable fashion. With Aliza Leventhal and Julie Collins, I published “Of Grasshoppers and Rhinos: A Visual Literacy Approach to Born-Digital Design Records,” also in American Archivist, in 2021. The paper applies a visual literacy approach to notoriously difficult digital design records such as CAD/BIM and 3D models in architectural archives with the hopes of making these materials more approachable to those responsible for preserving and providing access to them. And finally, with Jess Whyte, I’ve also been conducting interviews with Canadian memory workers on the issues they face and strategies they use in managing private and sensitive information in digital collections. Our paper, titled “‘Carefully and Cautiously’: How Canadian Cultural Memory Workers Review Digital Materials for Private and Sensitive Information,” will be published later this year in the open access journal Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research.

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

Receiving the NDSA award validated the work that I was doing in trying to develop and maintain open source software that makes digital archiving and digital preservation work easier for practitioners. It helped me get over a bit of imposter syndrome and find the confidence to pursue software development as a career rather than just an interest, which I’m deeply grateful for! I hope and suspect it also introduced some new folks to some of the tools that I’d been working on, which is always nice.

3) 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?

I think the conversations around environmental sustainability that have been happening in the last few years are wonderful and needed, especially as we see the effects of climate change unfold in real time. Digital stewardship will need to both respond to increasing risks of events like data center outages, and it behooves us to try to reduce our footprint as we can through classic archival practices like careful selection and new techniques like threat modeling and using defined levels of preservation tiers appropriate for various types of content being stored.

In the web archiving space, I’ve been really excited about the possibilities afforded by client-side replay in the browser made possible by Webrecorder’s replayweb.page tool. By being able to render and rewrite web archives in the browser we remove the need to upload data to a server in order to replay web archives and open up new exciting possibilities for access such as embedding web archive viewers into preservation and access systems (for more on that, see: https://replayweb.page/docs/embedding). I’m a big proponent of putting the focus on access to content that we’re preserving and I think this is a big step forward for web archives on that front!

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

Since winning the Excellence Award, I’ve been fortunate to receive a lot of mentoring and have grown into a senior developer, which is really exciting personally. I’ve also had the opportunity to deepen my thinking on the sustainability of open source projects that the digital stewardship and preservation fields rely on through firsthand experience as a solo maintainer and as a person working on larger open source projects with many contributors. It’s a difficult thing to get right but really important, as we don’t want the burden of maintaining these tools to fall on individuals who aren’t compensated for their labor or for projects to become abandoned after being widely adopted.

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

One thing I see as both a challenge and an opportunity currently is beginning to shift the focus from preserving content to providing open, sophisticated, useful access. Ultimately the goal of preservation is (or should be!) for someone to come use what we’re preserving. As the field matures and gets more comfortable in our preservation practices, I think there are a lot of interesting opportunities to demonstrate our value by connecting preserved content to users in forms that are useful to them, whether that means providing computational access to data, making it easier to integrate preserved content with our access systems, or pushing content to where people already are.

I’d also love to see us continue to lower the technical barriers to entry for digital preservation practice. A lot of the tools we rely on assume a certain level of competence with command line interfaces and scripting languages. Those tools can be great for providing a lot of flexibility to practitioners, and the field has done a lot to make learning these skills easier. That said, requiring such skills can also make it difficult to hire and mentor the next generation of digital stewards. I’d love to see our common toolsets continue to get more approachable and easier to use so that we can continue to grow and diversify our field of practitioners.

6) Are you working on any new digital preservation related tools at the moment? If so, could you please share a bit about the tool(s).

I’ve mentioned a few tools already, but I’d like to talk a little bit more about Browsertrix Cloud, the focus of a lot of my activity at Webrecorder these days. In the early days of development, a lot of our focus was on supporting functionality that were already possible through tools like Browsertrix Crawler in a more user-friendly and modern user interface. Now we’re focusing on building features that are new to Webrecorder, such as building and publicly sharing curated collections of web content, and integrating Browsertrix Cloud with existing tools like the archiveweb.page Chrome extension for manually archiving websites in your browser. By the end of the year, we’ll be working on some features that are I think relatively new to the web archiving field as a whole. I’m particularly excited about starting to work on software-assisted quality assurance (QA) of crawls, where we will be analyzing the WACZ files created by our crawler and presenting information to the end user about the relative quality of capture for the pages that have been crawled. That’s really just a start and I’m sure we’ll continue to refine what assisted QA can entail, but it aligns super well with my personal mission of using software to make currently onerous tasks easier for digital stewards, freeing them to use their time on the tasks where our expertise is most valuable.

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

Catching up with past NDSA Excellence Awards Winners: Project Electron

In 2020, Project Electron received the NDSA Innovation Award in the Project category. It impressed the awards panel with its comprehensive adaptation and extension of traditional archival principles and workflows to digital materials. A multi-year initiative at the Rockefeller Archive Center, it sought to implement sustainable, user-centered, and standards-compliant infrastructure to support the ongoing acquisition, management, and preservation of archival digital records. The panel also appreciated the positioning of this initiative as an open-source and standards-based effort. This would allow maximum opportunities for its transferability to other programmatic contexts in a time when many archival institutions face significant challenges in supporting digitized and born-digital records and special collections. Headshot for Hillel Arnold

We contacted Hillel Arnold and found out how Project Electron has evolved and learned how it has impacted other work.

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

We operationalized Project Electron in August 2019. Since then, we’ve continued to build on the infrastructure, methodologies, and expertise we built during the project.

One of the next big pieces of work we undertook was a complete rebuild of our discovery environment, locally branded as DIMES. The knowledge about building event-driven pipelines we picked up from Project Electron shaped this project, and also allowed us to complete it relatively quickly under challenging circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can read more about this project in the blog post announcing its launch.

Once we’d done all of that, the number of applications we needed to maintain had grown significantly, so we’ve also spent a fair amount of time improving our maintenance chops. As many folks know, I feel strongly that maintenance practices are both a core part of technology work as well as an enabler of strategic initiatives. We refined our continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines, and instituted regular, efficient processes for dependency management. This continues to be an important area of focus for us, as we look for ways to implement DevOps methodologies and tools which help to expand our pool of developers among our colleagues.

Finally, we’ve continued to invest in building a User Experience and Accessibility program to support ongoing evaluation and improvement of these systems.

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

For us, the Innovation Award was important because it provided external validation not only of what we were doing, but how we were going about it. It felt really good to know that other people saw value in what we were doing, even if they weren’t going to use our code, or if a completely different approach made sense for them. It also verified that our project values had been instrumental in directing us towards solutions that were reproducible and based in archival standards and practice. Most of all though, the award reaffirmed our participation in a community of digital preservation practitioners, which is incredibly important to the project team as well as the Rockefeller Archive Center as an institution. We have a lot to learn from each other!

3) How has Project Electron evolved since you won the Excellence Award?

As I mentioned above, Project Electron was an important platform for us in a number of ways. On the systems side, the approach we took has allowed us to extend the existing infrastructure to support additional workflows. So far we’ve built additional services to support a data pipeline for archival description, creation of image derivatives and IIIF manifests, and we’re in the process of building out services to support the ingest of digitized AV content. We’ve also spent some time improving the infrastructure’s scalability so we can process large files and large packages of files.

Going into the project, we always knew we would have to build more than just software applications. So, we’ve also spent a significant amount of time building a user community around the tools and working to support adoption across our donor organizations. In many cases this has involved implementing other tools such as DART to support the creation of BagIt bags by organizations.

We’re also trying to find ways to support records management processes in our donor organizations, since having an empowered records management function is key to successfully onboarding organizations because they are an effective way of mitigating concerns many of our donor organizations have about risk management. We’ve taken some broader approaches in this area too, such as spinning up a Records and Information Management Program to support these efforts, as well as establishing the Advancing Foundation Archives conference and community.

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

Climate change. In order for the work of digital preservation to be useful, there needs to be a future in which the records we’re preserving will be used. Thankfully, there is a growing conversation around issues of climate change and sustainability, and the ways that digital preservation is impacted by and can impact them. The things that make us skilled digital preservation practitioners (thinking about systems, data flows and disaster recovery) are also key ingredients in supporting sustainability, so we have a lot to offer. At the same time, significant changes in this area are going to require us to both work collectively across the entire archival sector, and also to develop partnerships outside of it.

Learn more about the other winners from the 2020 NDSA Innovation Awards!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Headshot of David Leija

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Responses in Spanish are below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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