NDSA:Digital Preservation in a Box

Back to the NDSA:Outreach Working Group Home.

Correlated with the NDIIPP "Personal Archiving in a Box" activity.

Purpose:

"Digital Preservation in a Box" is designed as a gentle introduction to the concepts of preserving digital information. Preserving digital information is a new concept that most people have little experience with. The guidance is basic and is meant to be a place to get started. There are four organizing steps to consider when preserving your personal digital information: Identify; Decide; Organize; and Copy. We'll discuss each in detail and provide some resources to help you get started.

This box of resources can be used to provide introductory-level education those who may have little to no knowledge of digital preservation and digital curation issues, to help them with stewarding their own digital information, which might include Photographs, Audio, Video, Electronic mail, Personal documents and Web archives.

Audience:

A general audience who routinely create or manage digital information, but who may need a working knowledge of this area for digital preservation on the job or for training others on how to preserve digital resources. The audience includes introductory LIS/MIS students, librarians, archivists and any other digital information professionals.

Structure:

“Digital Preservation in a Box” is a toolkit of resources.

The Box will be available as links to resources, be modular so that users can pull out only what they need or want, and will include items such as slides, videos, posters and handouts. Links to online tutorials or webinars are acceptable. It also could be modeled after an open-source software project, in that documentation on the Box will be available on a public web site where users can also download a tar, zip or other compressed file that includes all the resources necessary to use the Box. (See this Sourceforge page for an example of the potential look: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tuxpaint/)

The “box” structuring is conceptual as much as physical.

Box Contents:

• Box content list
• NDSA:How to Use the Resources in this Box (to be written)
• NDSA:Digital Preservation 101 (What is digital preservation and why is it important?)
• NDSA:Glossary
• Brief Introduction to Digitization
• Preservation By Format
• Digital Storage/Cloud Computing/Personal backup options
• NDSA:Resources for Educators
• NDSA:Marketing, Outreach and Event Guidance (Bookmarks, flyers and other promotional materials) (to be written)
• NDSA:Contact list/ones to watch/Bibliography