NDSA:Outreach Mission Action Team

Description of Work

The “Statement of Purpose” Action Team will explore the high-level mission that drives a digital preservation awareness campaign. What is the 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?

New name and additional work description from 12/10/2010 Outreach meeting minutes:

Statement of Purpose Team, What is the overarching mission, goal and message of this campaign? How will the overarching message be sliced and diced to appeal to different audiences? How will we know when we have succeeded in fulfilling our mission? What overall and far-reaching changes in how digital preservation “operates” in homes, schools and libraries are possible?

Short List Ideas

NDSA:Saving today for tomorrow

Ideas

This section is a space for people to brainstorm about either what our message should be like or how to go about crafting it.

Save your memories. Share your memories.

NOTE: The following messages with some associated suggestions for visual representations were gathered from Outreach IdeaScale web site contributions.

The Dead Sea thumb drives?

--Image of two thumb drives

What if Benjamin Franklin’s hard drive had crashed?

--Image of Ben looking inconsolably at a “blue screen of death”

Saving today for tomorrow

A classical loss?

--Image of well-used cassette tape with hand-written label “Beethoven’s 10th”

Saving today for tomorrow

Bits get bitten. Preserve.

Have you checked your old discs lately?

Digital memories. Here today, gone tomorrow?

Don't let a new digital dark age plague you.

I'll just open this ... DOH! It's GONE!

Don't forget

Bits are not forever

--can see a kind of digital-looking re-make of the classic string-on-a-finger icon with this one

What's your back-up plan?

Bits are not forever.

Preserving today for tomorrow.

NOTES:

Any message we put out should have some simple step our audience can take to improve preservation of their resources.
We will likely need a slightly different message to each target audience.
It might be better for the message to reflect future gain (you'll be able to have "this" if you act) than future loss (you'll lose "this" if you don't act).
That said, objects now known to be lost (say, organizations' first websites circa 1992-94) might be effective examples of what's at stake.
Maybe it's just because I'm paying attention now, but I'm seeing a lot of buzz on personal digital preservation, mostly from LC. Should we distill these tweets, articles, web pages to discern their common message?

Digital Preservation Drivers

NDSA:Digital Preservation Drivers

(Moved the drivers to their own page)

Digital Preservation Definitions

NDSA:Digital Preservation Definitions

Applying the Definitions to the Drivers

The idea here is that we would examine the digital preservation drivers and couch our range of definitions in the language of each of the drivers. For example, the driver "Rescue" brings to mind the positive feelings that folks feel about first responders and medical professionals. Let's keep that in mind and experiment with reframing our definitions so that they are couched in the language used by other communities, such as first responders (http://www.magicvalley.com/lifestyles/announcements/article_5c53c905-3f23-58c8-98a6-ef797ebf9d98.html) or medical professionals (http://www.valuemd.com/st-georges-university-school-medicine/3860-what-your-motivation-becoming-doctor.html) to talk about our own work.

Metaphors

"Next they find a metaphor that connects the motivation to the end goal and develop scenarios to help them create meaning." - Bill Moggridge, Designing Interactions, pg. 130

"Smartening up" not "dumbing down."

Not "honing," --> "clarifying."

Actions

If we are successful in getting our message across to people, what do we want them to do?

Nothing
Riot
Think about the issue
Call our toll-free hotline
Learn more
Actively preserve something
Reorganize their hard drive
Buy a product
Give money
Share with their social network