NDSA:Tech Community Engagement

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Anil Dash mentioned at the digital preservation 2012 meeting (wrap-up blog post now at http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/07/record-crowd-participates-in-digitalpreservation-2012/) that the "Tech Community" has little understanding of what the digital preservation community is trying to accomplish.

Building on that, the NDSA Outreach group is looking to put together a list of "Asks" and "Offers" for the Tech community.

That is, when we have an opportunity to engage with the Tech community, what 5 things would we ask of them? Let's be as specific as possible with these!

And at the same time, what 5 things does our community have to offer to the Tech Community? We can be a little more general with these! :)

What Would We "Ask" of the Tech Community?

• Make it easy for LAMs to preserve the content produced by your users – enable preservation through your API.
• Build functionality into popular handheld devices, like smart phones and digital cameras, that supports creation of preservation-ready digital objects
• Don't push off all the costs of preservation to libraries, archives and museums
• Make sure you have a broad group of the community at the table when you discuss future IT strategy.

What Do We Have to "Offer" the Tech Community?

• resources to educate the Tech Community about digital preservation and long term data viability
• guidelines for entering into digital preservation partnerships with libraries and archives
• collaborative opportunities to look at how to include digital preservation partnerships into terms & conditions
• forums for discussion, scholarship, and industry best practices for digital preservation
• The prestige of collaborating with memory institutions.

Storage Vendors

There were several excellent ideas to engage storage vendors in putting "digital preservation" messages in the README files of their devices. Or other ways of engaging with the storage vendor industry. Some thoughts:

• Are there current initiatives with storage vendors by the digital preservation community?
• Are the storage industry events that the NDSA should participate in?
• Are the activities currently being practiced within the storage industry that the NDSA can leveraged to support digital preservation?
• 2 of the HDD companies that sell into the professional audio environment have already offered to preinstall the PCA project metadata collection app (http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/bms_chace/bms_chace.html)

Several excellent examples included partnering with storage device providers to get an “NDSA-approved” message included with each drive; targeting non-professional photographers by extending the dpBestFlow.org web site; etc. This could involve the creation of something like a “Contacts” database to keep track of potential outlets for future engagement such as the Ad Council and other non-profit marketing entities.