NDSA:Broadening and Networking the Field of Research in Digital Preservation
Broadening and Networking the Field of Research in Digital Preservation
Action Team Members
- George Oates, Internet Archive
- Dan Dodge, Thomson Reuters
- Trevor Owens, Library of Congress
Project Overview
As part of the Innovation Working Group’s mandate to spur innovation, this project will develop a plan to bring individuals outside of the organizations and specialties currently participating in the NDSA, but whose work may be relevant to digital preservation, into conversation with the field. Examples of potential related fields include but are not limited to, digital archeology/forensics, virtualization of programming environments, material sciences, and humanities computing. This team's work is expected to include hosting a set of interviews, dialogs, or talks which could be shared on a blog, as a webinar series, or through some other communications platform. The action team will communicate over email and report their work on the wiki page at:
The action team will also report on their work to members of the Innovation Working Group through periodic group phone calls.
Email Trevor Owens (trow@loc.gov)if you would like to participate.
Format
Text: The Innovation Working group will conduct interviews/conversations over email, a wiki, or Google docs and then share the resulting text interviews through some manner of blog or wiki where they will invite conversation from the broader NDSA community. It might be ideal for the Action Team to get the format and process for this down enough that any NDSA member could use them to play host to an interview/conversation and then the Innovation Working Group would put it in the queue.
Fields and Projects
- Digital records in medicine. Of particular interest, medical imaging
- Crowdsourcing projects, for example metadata games, Google image labeler, zooniverse. @home projects
- Open access publishing, for example Public Library of Science
- Data visualization and UI designers interested in cultural heritage projects.
- Data mining approaches and tools for scholars, example Voyeur Tools
- digital archeology/forensics,
- virtualization of programming environments,
- material sciences
- Astronomy
- Video gaming
- Scientific fields that particularly rely on “big data” (e.g., climate modeling)
- U.S. Census. Best practices about keeping track of many records that have metadata and data. What digital preservation method(s) are being used?
- Statistics and Mathematical modeling (e.g, sports statistics, economic modeling)
To do
- Draft general introduction paragraph about what we are trying to do here that we can use as text to put contact people for these interview/conversations
- For each potential field/project, draft a sentence or two explaining why we think it might be interesting/relevant
- Pull together a set of general questions we can use, or at least a set of general guiding themes for these interview/conversations
- Come up with a pithy name
General Invitation/Introduction Paragraph
New voices in digital stewardship (or whatever better name we decide on) is an attempt by the Innovation Working Group of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) to engage with individuals working on projects or in areas that preservation and discovery and access of digital materials. In this project, we are engaging in interactions over email which are then posted for the community to comment on and discuss. The goal of these conversations is to generate innovative ideas for NDSA members and engage new communities in conversations about digital preservation and stewardship.
Information about the NDSA can be found here:
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/
Guiding Questions
I had a tough time working up questions that could be general enough to work across all of the diverse fields we have discussed. While this set of questions is very general I would hope that it could serve as the basis to start a conversation which would then involve an additional set of questions that focus in on the particular relevant issues in a given context.
- Can you briefly describe or characterize the field you are working in or the kinds of projects you work on?
- What are the most pressing challenges or hardest problems to solve in this work?
- What do you think is the thing about your field that most outsiders find the most interesting or useful?
- How do people in your field communicate with each other? With people outside your area of interest?
- Does your field deal with digital content (datasets, digital objects, text, audio, video, etc), and how?
- What kind of implications does your project or field have for preservation, access and discovery of digital objects?
- What do you think are the most important things we can learn from your field?
- What do you think your field might contribute to other fields?
- Do you think the challenges and problems in your field will be different in 5 years or 10 years? In the next generation?
- Can you describe innovation in your field and how it happens?
- Based on your work and field what kinds of work would you like to see the digital preservation and stewardship community take on?
- Can you suggest other people who are doing interesting or innovative work that you think might be of interest to the digital preservation community?
Pithy Name Ideas
- Broadening Conversations about Digital Preservation
- Roving Conversations about Digital Preservation
- Digital Stewardship Conversations
- Digital Stewardship Dialogs
- New Voices in Digital Stewardship
- Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Digital Preservation
- Interdisciplinary Research about Digital Preservation
- Applying Interdisciplinary Studies to Digital Stewardship
- Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Digital Preservation
- Innovation Conversations: Digital Stewardship Dialogs