NDSA:“Audience”

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Who/What are the audiences for digital preservation actions?

Library School Students

The Outreach group has gradually come around to focusing on Library School students and education as a particular audience of focus.

Library Student Blogs

• http://hacklibschool.wordpress.com
• http://thebinderblog.com
• http://micahvandegrift.wordpress.com
• http://juliacskinner.com
• http://catladylibrarian.wordpress.com
• http://foundinthelib.wordpress.com

There is a pretty active tweet chat (using the hashtag #libchat) on Twitter every Wednesday at 8pm EDT

Other Audiences

Might be useful to bring in consumer marketing demographics such as Experian's Lifestyle Consumer Mosaic.

Another way to look at it is who makes the "preserving" decisions in a household/organization.

"Household" implying "consumer-level." Could further split into "memory responsibility" vs. "technical responsibility" (could also do this in organizations). For better or worse, this split is often gender-based, with the "man" taking on the "technical responsibility" and the "woman" taking on the "memory responsibility."

Do we target only those with "memory responsibility"? Is there a different message for those with "technical responsibility"? And if there is a gender-based split, how does that effect the way we shape the message?

Consumer vs. Professional? What about NDSA:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosumer pro-sumer?

OR, what if we approached this from the perspective of 'what' is being preserved vs. 'who' is doing the preserving? Can we try to define who our audience(s) are that way? I think we all realize we must focus on the most general of audiences for a large 'all-encompassing' ad campaign. Can we define a common thread across both "memory" and "technical" responsibilities to focus on? I.e. there were some great examples given in a few of the calls related to iPhone photos and other personal items like electronic letters (i.e. email correspondence, fb messages, etc.). Perhaps we can use the 'things to be preserved' to relate to both the consumer and professional realms. To be effective we must say something to our audience that directly points to some process in their daily life that happens digitally and has meaning for them.

LC's Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) initiative has identified audiences for digital preservation training. This might be helpful when considering audiences for outreach NDSA:http://digitalpreservation.gov/education/