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One of the panels I attended at SAA this year was titled “Exploring the User Experience with Digital Primary Sources,” which covered a wide range of topics, starting with understanding a repository’s user community, assessing that community’s needs and behavior, and discovering new opportunities for archives and archivists to engage in research and scholarly production.

SAA 2013 New Orleans

Session 604: Defining Levels of Preservation and Management for Electronic Records

This session addressed the initial steps or levels of preservation for electronic records management. It was held on Saturday August 17, 2013 at Archives 2013 New Orleans.

I was going to write an overview of this session, but this article gives a good summary of it, so I’ll just make a few additional comments. The links to the definitions of cloud computing (NIST and NARA) are particularly clarifying, especially if you happen to be one of the 51% who are not sure exactly what cloud computing is. Much to my disappointment, this session was about using the cloud for digital preservation storage, and did not address the much more tricky topic of working with donors who have materials stored in the cloud. Storing digital objects using cloud-based systems or services is fairly straight-forward; pulling those materials out of the cloud in a reliable, authentic manner is not.

Below are the summaries and slides from the presentations of the Digital Preservation Interest group at ALA annual in Chicago. Overall it was an informative session which gave a great overview of some of the current activities in the digital preservation fields.

The NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation

The Levels of Digital Preservation is an initiative of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) that provides a tiered set of recommendations for institutions undertaking digital preservation. Created by a diverse team of practitioners from NDSA-member organizations, the Levels guidelines are agnostic towards institution size, resource level, and specific technologies. The Levels are intended to be easy-to-use and focus on specific best-practices instead of overall digital preservation program development. This presentation will introduce the Levels project’s origins, explicate its recommendations, and review its practical and planning uses. The Levels is an evolving project, so feedback and input from the Digital Preservation Interest Group will be very much encouraged.

Over the last few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to work with Teresa and Hillel to develop the RAC’s Historypin channel. Historypin is a geographically-based content aggregator that provides a platform for both institutions and individuals to upload images, audio, video, or narrative text and pin them to locations on a map of the world. Historypin is great because it dramatically expands access to historical materials that otherwise might be part of an infrequently used archival collection or gathering dust in someone’s attic. For the RAC, Historypin is especially beneficial because it allows us to reuse already-digitized content and metadata while also improving our search rankings and creating more ways for people to discover our collections.