Making Certain Digital Content is Preserved: Archiving Digital Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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