News: Royal Babies and the National Agenda for Digital Stewardship
Since its founding in December 2010, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance has worked to establish, maintain, and advance the capacity to preserve our nation’s digital resources for the benefit of present and future generations. If digital resources are not preserved, even the most celebrated news of the day like Princess Kate’s new baby, will be lost to future generations. Hampshire College Library has been a committed partner to the NDSA since 2012.
In late 2012 the NDSA Coordinating Committee, in partnership with NDSA working group chairs, began brainstorming ways to leverage the NDSA’s national membership and broad expertise to raise the profile of digital stewardship issues to legislators, funders and other decision-makers. The National Agenda for Digital Stewardship became the vehicle to highlight, on an ongoing, annual basis, the key issues that affect digital stewardship practice most effectively for decision-makers.
The NDSA is excited to announce the release of the inaugural Agenda on Tuesday July 23 in conjunction with the Digital Preservation 2013 meeting. “The Agenda identifies our most pressing digital preservation challenges as a nation and gives us the direction to deal with them collaboratively,” said Andrea Goethals, the Digital Preservation and Repository Services Manager at the Harvard University Library and one of the Agenda’s authors.
Effective digital stewardship is vital to maintaining the public records necessary for understanding and evaluating government actions; the scientific evidence base for replicating experiments, building on prior knowledge; and the preservation of the nation’s cultural heritage, but in the current resource-challenged climate, digital stewardship issues often get lost in the shuffle.
Still, there is broad recognition that the need to ensure that today’s valuable digital content remains accessible, useful, and comprehensible in the future is a worthwhile effort, supporting a thriving economy, a robust democracy, and a rich cultural heritage.
The 2014 National Agenda integrates the perspective of dozens of experts and hundreds of institutions, convened through the Library of Congress, to provide funders and other executive decision-makers with insight into emerging technological trends, gaps in digital stewardship capacity, and key areas for development.
Hampshire Library is excited to be present at the Digital Preservation 2013 meeting. Jennifer King will present a poster about Hampshire’s recent participation in a 3-College trial of Islandora, an open-source framework for managing digital collections. The poster, “An Island(ora) in the Pioneer Valley: The Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College 3-College Trial of Islandora.” was created by Hampshire’s archivist and former NDSA Standards and Best Practices Working Group chair Jimi Jones. This trial was an attempt at explore both the strengths of the Islandora system as well as the strengths derived from approaching digital preservation and management collaboratively between 3 of the 5 Colleges. The national agenda’s broader focus will be an invaluable tool as small and large institutions, and consortia, move forward with our responsibility to be good stewards of digital content.
The Agenda informs individual organizational efforts, planning, goals, and opinions with the aim to offer inspiration and guidance and suggest potential directions and key areas of inquiry for research and future work in digital stewardship.
The Agenda is designed to generate comment and conversation over the coming months in order to impact future activities, policies, strategies and actions that ensure that digital content of vital importance to the nation is acquired, managed, organized, preserved and accessible for as long as necessary.
In addition to the discussions during the Digital Preservation 2013 meeting, a series of webinars will be scheduled over the next few months to provide further opportunities for the digital stewardship community to learn more about the agenda and explore opportunities to put it into practice.
The release of the inaugural Agenda is an important milestone in digital stewardship practice. For more information follow the activity on Twitter (hashtag: #nationalagenda or @NDSA2) and read more about the NDSA and the Agenda on the Signal blog.