NDSA:Values Statement

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance and all member organizations are bound as a community by the following values.

Stewardship

Members of the NDSA are committed to managing digital content for current and long-term use. The members of the NDSA are actively committed to ensuring sustained access to the digital content that comprises our national history and empowers us as leaders in the global knowledge economy. Individually, these organizations support the management of digital resources; as an Alliance, we commit to protecting our nation's cultural, scientific, scholarly, and business heritage.

Collaboration

Collaborative work is the centering value of the Alliance, it is a value shared by all members and a priority in work with all organizations and associations. Approaching digital stewardship collaboratively allows the NDSA to coordinate effort, avoid duplicate work, build a community of practice, develop new preservation strategies, flexibly respond to a changing economic landscape, and build relationships to increase capacity to manage content beyond institutional boundaries.

Inclusiveness

The NDSA is a collaborative effort to preserve a distributed national digital collection for the benefit of current and future generations. We value the range of experience, the potential for innovation, and the fault-tolerance that heterogeneity brings. We believe the preservation of digital information is a pervasive challenge and that engaging across different communities strengthens the nation’s digital preservation practices and increases the likelihood of preserving data now and into the future.

Exchange

Members of the Alliance encourage the open exchange of ideas, services, and software. This leverages the commitments of each member to increase the capacity of the entire stewardship network. In this way the act of participation and engagement result in innovations and benefits that can be shared by all.