NDSA:Clearinghouse of Digital Preservation Information
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How can the NDSA leverage technology to build a full and complete information resource or provide pointers to a curated list of information sources?
What are existing outlets for disseminating information, concentrating on those that are already successfully providing information about digital preservation, but also exploring interesting, creative venues for spreading the message.
The NDSA:Digital Preservation in a Box activity aggregates information, while also linking to marketing and other communication materials.
Digital Stewardship Forum
Draft version of the Forum at http://ndsa.ezphotoscanning.net/forum/
Mission Statement: The Digital Stewardship Forum will be the premier location on the Net for users and practitioners to share information about the best practices, methods and tools to preserve digital information for the long-term. Staffed by digital stewardship experts from the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, the DSF will offer lively conversation on all manner of digital stewardship issues, including digitization issues, preservation by format, digital storage technologies, tools, and much more.
The Outreach WG will provide the staffing core, but participation will be spread across the entirety of the NDSA to all areas of expertise.
Some work still needs to be done to establish a permanent URL and to explore administrative management issues, but once that has been done the Forum will be ready for public unveiling. Estimated timeframe for launch: Late March/early April 2012.
Volunteers:
- Katherine Skinner
- Butch Lazorchak
- You!
Kickstarter Curated Pages
Kickstarter is the “world’s largest funding platform for creative projects.” Besides being a resource the NDSA may explore at a later date for funding, Kickstarter provides a way to help the NDSA build its brand. This is through Kickstarter Curated Pages (http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/curated-pages). The NDSA now has a Kickstarter Curator page a http://www.kickstarter.com/pages/NDSA.
Organizations take on responsibility for highlighting Kickstarter projects worthy of attention that fit the mission of the organization. This would have two benefits:
- It would help build the NDSA brand by putting us in the company of forward-thinking organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Creative Commons, Rhizome.org (an NDSA member!), MassArt and many others.
- It would put us in touch with projects doing stewardship work and help us understand the new economics of these types of activities and how to leverage Kickstarter for funding if necessary.
Volunteers:
- Carol Minton Morris
- Deborah Rossum
- Vickie Allen
Ultimately, any NDSA member can act as an administrator on the Kickstarter page, but we want to be able to coordinate activity through the group and also to follow a set of NDSA "Kickstarter Guidelines" to make sure we represent the organization well.
If you're interested in becoming a Kickstarter administrator, please drop a note to Carol Minton Morris. You can then go to http://www.kickstarter.com/organizations/ndsa/membership/new and get started.
Education Resources
National Calendar of Digital Preservation Courses: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/education/courses/index.html
Association for Library and Information Science Education: http://www.alise.org/
Digital Preservation Course Syllabi
Examples of Other Clearinghouses
Digital Curation Exchange
(http://digitalcurationexchange.org/) "The Digital Curation Exchange has been created to serve as a "town center" for the practitioners, researchers, educators, and students of digital curation. Users can create an account and add digital curation events, jobs, resources or questions and discuss what others have shared in the comments section.
The site is designed to provide an environment in which you can engage with a rich digital curation community. More than just a resting place for materials, DCE serves as a starting point for discussions on topics about and for digital curation. This is a free and open space for the exchange of digital curation information, and anyone with an interest in digital curation is welcome to join and participate.
The Digital Curation Exchange is supported by IMLS funds awarded to the Closing the Digital Curation Gap Project (http://ils.unc.edu/gap/index.html) [IMLS Sponsor Award #LG-05-09-0040] and was initiated under the DigCCurr II project (http://ils.unc.edu/digccurr/aboutII.html) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Information & Library Science."
Digital Humanities Now
(see the NDSA Ideascale link at http://ndsa.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Launch-automated-digital-stewardship-innovation--new-journal-/29396-4760) "Digital Humanities Now is a real-time, crowdsourced publication. It takes the pulse of the digital humanities community and tries to discern what articles, blog posts, projects, tools, collections, and announcements are worthy of greater attention.
Digital Humanities Now is fully automated. It is created by ingesting the Twitter feeds of hundreds of scholars followed by @dhnow (a list of scholars taken from a digital humanities Twitter list), processing these feeds through Twittertim.es to generate a more narrow feed of common interest and debate, and reformatting that feed on http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/, in part to allow for further (non-Twitter) discussions.
Dan Cohen of the George Mason Center for History and New Media made dhnow using Wordpress and the twittertimes algorithm and has offered assistance in setting it up.
The Digital Humanities Questions & Answers (http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/) site could be a model for the type of forum we could set up. Set up "Digital Preservation Questions & Answers" and "staff" it with members of the NDSA Outreach Working Group.