National Digital Stewardship Research Articles

Advancing Preservation for Archives and Manuscripts

Advancing Preservation for Archives and Manuscripts

Some Assembly Required: Low-Cost Digitization of Materials from Magnetic Tape Formats for Preservation and Access

Recent work discussing the digitization and preservation of magnetic tape materials has maintained that it should be left to expert practitioners and that the resulting digital materials should be stored in digital repositories. This article suggests that librarians and archivists lacking extensive technical skills or access to expertise can digitize these materials themselves. It provides a detailed account, including challenges faced, of how a team of practitioners without prior training or experience digitized historical audio recordings on cassette and open reel tape at Northern Illinois University Libraries. The discussion reviews the assembly of equipment and software that the team used for digitization work, discussing each element’s significance and how they came together as a functioning workflow. The authors also emphasize the fact that while the digitization of fragile and/or degraded magnetic tape materials may contribute to the preservation of their contents, this action also creates a new set of materials with their own preservation needs. Realizing that many practitioners serving medium-sized and smaller institutions lacking large financial resources may not have access to a full-fledged digital repository, they suggest the use of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s Levels of Digital Preservation rubric as a means by which practitioners may incrementally increase the probability that digital materials made from magnetic tapes will remain accessible.

NDSR Art @ Mia

AbstractIn 2017, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) joined the National Digital Stewardship Residency for Art Information (NDSR Art) inaugural cohort, hosting a project focused on preservation ...

Planning for Time-Based Media Artwork Preservation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

AbstractThe National Digital Stewardship Residency in Art Information (NDSR Art) project at the Philadelphia Museum of Art titled “Planning for Time-Based Media Artwork Preservation” was a year-lon...

Trevor Owens. The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. 226p. Paper, $34.95 (ISBN 978-1-4214-2697-6).

The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation presents an overview of the issues inherent to undertaking digital preservation, with an eye to getting the reader to understand the theoretical building blocks of the topic so they can develop preservation plans that will meet the unique needs of their collections. The book is written by Trevor Owens, the head of digital content management for library services at the Library of Congress. Owens has been actively involved in digital preservation planning, playing a part in developing the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Levels of Digital Preservation.

Complexities of Digital Preservation in a Virtual Reality Environment, the Case of Virtual Bethel

The complexity of preserving virtual reality environments combines the challenges of preserving singular digital objects, the relationships among those objects, and the processes involved in creating those relationships. A case study involving the preservation of the Virtual Bethel environment is presented. This case is active and ongoing. The paper provides a brief history of the Bethel AME Church of Indianapolis and its importance, then describes the unique preservation challenges of the Virtual Bethel project, and finally provides guidance and preservation recommendations for Virtual Bethel, using the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Levels of Preservation. Discussion of limitations of the guidance and recommendations follow.

Keepers of Our Digital Future: An Assessment of the National Digital Stewardship Residencies, 2013–2016

Keepers of Our Digital Future: An Assessment of the National Digital Stewardship Residencies, 2013–2016

BHL’s Feedback Tools and User Surveys: Investigating User Needs for Data in Digital Libraries

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a digital library dedicated to improving research efficiency through open access to biodiversity literature as part of a global biodiversity community. BHL currently makes over 52 million pages of biodiversity literature freely available and drew over 1 million visitors in 2016. Additionally, over 4 million API calls were made to extract data from the site last year. To meet the needs of these users and continuously improve research efficiency, BHL has relied on feedback submitted through issue reporting tools on the website and through direct engagement with users. With support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, BHL is also currently hosting five residents through a National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) project, entitled Foundations to Actions, to methodically gather input on best practices in digital libraries; recommendations for crowdsourcing transcriptions for improved data access; strategies for enhancing image access; analysis of collection strengths and gaps; and overall user needs. This session will highlight initial results from a user survey designed to identify and prioritize recommended improvements and new features for accessing the data in BHL.

Trends in Digital Preservation Capacity and Practice: Results from the 2nd Bi-annual National Digital Stewardship Alliance Storage Survey

Research and practice in digital preservation requires a solid foundation of evidence of what is being protected and what practices are being used. The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) storage survey provides a rare opportunity to examine the practices of most major US memory institutions. The repeated, longitudinal design of the NDSA storage surveys offer a rare opportunity to more reliably detect trends within and among preservation institutions rather than the typical surveys of digital preservation, which are based on one-time measures and convenience (Internet-based) samples. The survey was conducted in 2011 and in 2013. The results from these surveys have revealed notable trends, including continuity of practice within organizations over time, growth rates of content exceeding predictions, shifts in content availability requirements, and limited adoption of best practices for interval fixity checking and the Trusted Digital Repositories (TDR) checklist. Responses from new memory organizations increased the variety of preservation practice reflected in the survey responses.

Auditoría de preservación digital con NDSA Levels

NDSA Levels is a methodology created by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) at the United States to assess the level of digital preservation of a particular institution. Results of its application in 8 public and private organizations in Spain, Mexico, Brazil and Switzerland are presented. From this experience it is concluded that the NDSA Levels methodology is easy to apply and that its application besides alerting about the aspects not yet implemented, provides guidance on the technical actions that should be undertaken in the future within a preservation plan.

The National Digital Stewardship Residency: Building a Community of Practice through Postgraduate Training and Education

The National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) program addresses the need for a dedicated community of professionals with the knowledge and technical skills to ensure the long-term viability of the digital record by matching recent postgraduate degree recipients with cultural heritage institutions to manage digital stewardship projects. Since the initial NDSR DC pilot program, there have been five more iterations of the program — NDSR New York, NDSR Boston, American Archive of Public Broadcasting NDSR, NDSR Art, and Biodiversity Heritage Library NDSR. Although these programs share the same characteristics, each operates independently and no formalized guidelines or standards currently exist to link all the programs together. In the fall of 2015, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) was awarded an IMLS grant to evaluate the early NDSR programs. By providing a comprehensive picture of the NDSR programs that were completed by 2016, the study was intended to help the NDSR community build connections across initiatives and learn from the experiences of its first participants. IMLS also funded the NDSR Symposium planned for April 2017, which will serve as an opportunity to bring stakeholders together to incorporate the strongest practices of each iteration and develop a standardized model for future programs.

Process history metadata for time-based media artworks at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA) is a world-renowned museum with a large collection of time-based media artworks. Media conservators in MoMA’s conservation department noticed a gap in their documentation for time-based media artworks: there was no standardised way of recording the digitisation or format migration history of an artwork, known as its process history. Conservators require such information to store and exhibit an artwork in a way that matches the artist’s original vision. The National Digital Stewardship Resident at MoMA was tasked with creating a standardised metadata profile that could record and store this information. The resulting profile uses the PREMIS, PBCore, reVTMD and METS schemas to record technical metadata about every tool used to digitise or migrate an artwork from one format to another. This metadata profile ensures that the artistic and bit-level authenticity of timebased media artworks can be maintained and understood now and in the future.

NDSA Storage Report: Reflections on National Digital Stewardship Alliance Member Approaches to Preservation Storage Technologies

NDSA Storage Report: Reflections on National Digital Stewardship Alliance Member Approaches to Preservation Storage Technologies

The NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation: Explanation and Uses

The “Levels of Digital Preservation” being refined now by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA), is a tiered set of recommendations on how organizations should begin to build or enhance their digital preservation activities. A work in progress, it is intended to be a relatively easy-to-use set of guidelines useful not only for those just beginning to think about preserving their digital assets, but also for institutions planning the next steps in enhancing their existing digital preservation systems and workflows. It allows institutions to assess the level of preservation achieved for specific materials in their custody. It is not designed to assess the robustness of digital preservation programs as a whole since it does not cover such things as policies, staffing, or organizational support. The guidelines are organized into five functional areas that are at the heart of digital preservation systems: storage and geographic location, file fixity and data integrity, information security, metadata, and file formats.This paper presents the Levels, explains the context of the project's development within the NDSA, describes the rationale behind each of the guidelines and why they were prioritized the way they were, suggests how the guidelines may be used, and compares and contrasts the Levels to other ways of assessing stages of digital preservation. Other assessment models include Nancy McGovern and Anne Kenney's “The Five Organizational Stages of Digital Preservation,” Charles Dollar and Lori Ashley's “Digital Preservation Capability Maturity Model,” and OCLC Research's 2012 report, “You've Got to Walk Before You Can Run: First Steps for Managing Born-Digital Content Received on Physical Media.” Finally, the paper requests feedback on the work in progress and outlines planned future work.