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Making Certain Digital Content is Preserved: Archiving Digital Resources

Virtual Conference

About This Virtual Conference

Publishers, aggregators, government agencies, research institutes and libraries understand the value in and require archiving mechanisms in order to retain access to scholarly records in a constantly changing information landscape. Over the last several years, best practices have been developed and many initiatives have been launched to rise to the challenge in preserving these works but perhaps without a clear vision for how or who will support long-term maintenance to ensure this critical information is not lost or degraded. This virtual event will address the past, present and future state of digital preservation including an overview, institutional policies, metadata and formats, accessibility, types of archives and repositories, back-up systems and issues of security. 

Event Sessions

11:00 a.m. – 11:10 a.m. – Introduction

Speaker

11:10 – 11:45am Why Preservation of Scholarly Content Matters

Speaker

After a general introduction to the subject of Preservation, and to CLOCKSS, the presentation will touch on these aspects:
- How Preservation matters to end users, libraries, publishers, funders, and research institutes
- How CLOCKSS works
- Current challenges
- What is needed, to ensure Preservation of scholarly content (“the minutes of science”)

11:45am – 12:15pm Enabling the Preservation Relay: Interoperable Repository Architectures

Speakers

Karl Benedict

Associate Professor and Director of Research Data Services, College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences
University of New Mexico

The variety of business and service models among digital repositories put data at risk when production repositories lack a mandate or capability for long term preservation. Repository architects can mitigate these risks through development of systems which support the identification and migration of digital assets at scale. In this session, we describe the preservation-enabling features of the Geographic Storage and Retrieval Engine (GSToRE) and provide an overview of requirements and workflows for cross-platform data transfer.

12:15pm - 12:45pm Harvard Library’s Digital Preservation Repository, the Digital Repository Service

Speaker

Andrea Goethals

Manager of Digital Preservation and Repository Services
Harvard University

This presentation will start with an overview of this 16-year old repository, including key policies and strategies, what it contains and the technology and people behind it. Some of the current work will be highlighted, as well as challenges and future work.

12:45pm - 1:45pm Lunch

1:45 – 2:15pm Portico: Lessons from a Community Supported Archive

Speakers

In this presentation, Kate Wittenberg, Amy Kirchhoff, and Stephanie Orphan will provide an overview of Portico, including what types of content we preserve, what technical infrastructure is required, and why preservation is important for scholarly communication. We will also discuss partnerships we have developed that leverage work we have done, and what challenges and opportunities lie ahead.

2:15pm – 2:45pm Information Digitization in the Humanities: The Cultural Assessment Interest Group

Speaker

The Cultural Assessment Interest Group is a new Digital Library Federation Assessment Interest Group initiative that sprang from many conversations held during last year’s DLF Forum following Safiya Noble’s keynote about power structures in information technology entitled “Power, Privilege, and the Imperative to Act”, and continued to gain steam with the keynote during 2016’s DLF Forum by Stacie Williams “All Labor is Local”. Growing within the digital library community was a sense of unease as evidenced by the themes of such talks. Perhaps we have not been quite as aware we’d hoped when it came to information creation and digitization.  This year a group of GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) specialists came together to begin evaluating how well librarians are representing and delivering the shared cultural heritage in digital collections. The Cultural Assessment Interesting Group takes a critical look at the processes that create digital collections from material selection to metadata creation in order to highlight areas of potential perpetuation of societal power structures and correction of biased representation in digital collections.

This discussion will highlight the necessity of this work, the progress of this group to date and their intended outcomes over the next year.

2:45pm – 3:15pm Digital Library of the Middle East

Speakers

Elizabeth Waraksa

Program Director for Research and Strategic Initiatives
Association of Research Libraries (ARL)

Imagine an online resource that not only offers robust, professionally curated metadata and images for the collective cultural heritage of the Middle East, but also tracks ownership status for scholars and governmental entities alike, and allows for experiencing artifacts and cultural heritage sites in new media formats like holograms and immersive 3D. Thanks to a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Antiquities Coalition and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) are simultaneously exploring the feasibility and technical prototyping of just such a resource – which we are calling the Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) – while building support and gathering input for this crucial endeavor among our many anticipated allies and partners around the world.

3:30pm – 4:00 Digital Archiving/Preservation Policy

Speakers

As publishers, libraries and museums increasingly create, collect, and depend upon digital data and collections, preservation policies and strategies are more important than ever. Digital preservation policies should be designed in such a way that they will actually be used and referred to and they should align with overall digital strategy. This presentation will present a simple framework for getting started (or re-started) on digital preservation in your organization.

4:00pm – 4:30pm Smithsonian Institution Archives: Durable Access to Digital Primary Sources

Speaker

Ricc Ferrante

Information Technology Archivist & Director of Digital Services
Smithsonian Institution Archives

Documenting over 170 years of the Institution established for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge,” the Archives collects primary source materials from the Smithsonian’s museums, research centers, curators, scientists and administrative offices. With decades-old born holdings and an increasing body of digitized collections, the Archives uses digital preservation and curation methodologies to provide durable digital access to scholars, researchers and the public around the world. This presentation will illustrate how these methodologies are implemented along with examples of how some researchers have used the collections as a result.

4:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Roundtable Discussion Moderated by Jill O'Neill

Additional Information

  • Cancellations made by Day, Date, Year will receive a refund, less a $35 cancellation. After that date, there are no refunds.

  • Registrants will receive detailed instructions about accessing the virtual conference via e-mail the Friday prior to the event. (Anyone registering between Monday and the close of registration will receive the message shortly after the registration is received, within normal business hours.) Due to the widespread use of spam blockers, filters, out of office messages, etc., it is your responsibility to contact the NISO office if you do not receive login instructions before the start of the webinar.

  • If you have not received your Login Instruction e-mail by 10 a.m. (ET) on the day before the virtual conference, please contact the NISO office at nisohq@niso.org for immediate assistance.

  • Registration is per site (access for one computer) and includes access to the online recorded archive of the conference. You may have as many people as you like from the registrant's organization view the conference from that one connection. If you need additional connections, you will need to enter a separate registration for each connection needed.

  • If you are registering someone else from your organization, either use that person's e-mail address when registering or contact nisohq@niso.org to provide alternate contact information.

  • Conference presentation slides and Q&A will be posted to this event webpage following the live conference.

  • Registrants will receive an e-mail message containing access information to the archived conference recording within 48 hours after the event. This recording access is only to be used by the registrant's organization.

For Online Events

  • NISO has developed a quick tutorial, How to Participate in a NISO Web Event. Please view the recording, which is an overview of the web conferencing system and will help to answer the most commonly asked questions regarding participating in an online Webex event.
  • You will need a computer for the presentation and Q&A.

  • Audio is available through the computer (broadcast) and by telephone. We recommend you have a set-up for telephone audio as back-up even if you plan to use the broadcast audio as the voice over Internet isn't always 100% reliable.

Please check your system in advance to make sure it meets the Cisco WebEx requirements. It is your responsibility to ensure that your system is properly set up before each webinar begins.