NDSA:Public Awareness of Digital Preservation Issues and Challenges

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Overview

The activity of raising public awareness is the most significant activity of the NDSA Outreach Working Group. This includes at least two high-level activities:

Authoring/framing/describing the high-level “ Statement of Purpose” that drives any digital preservation public awareness campaign, at whatever level. Is there a single dominant message that the NDSA hopes to propagate regarding the preservation of digital information? Are different messages (or variations on a single message) necessary to reach different audiences? What are the 1-word, 3-word, sentence and paragraph messages that NDSA is trying to propagate?

The NDSA:“Audience” explorations touch on the different audiences for digital preservation information, working to paint a clearer picture of the issues facing each audience, and considering ways that the mission of the NDSA can be presented to each audience. Audiences include the general public, practitioners, funders, legislators, etc.

The high-level messages are then implemented in a number of discrete activities:

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.