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.

Presenter:

Jefferson Bailey, Strategic Initiatives Manager at Metropolitan New York Library Council and Co-chair of the Innovation Working Group of the NDSA.

Slides: LevelsofPreservation

The Digital POWRR project

The Digital POWRR project is funded by an IMLS National Leadership Grant that is driven by partners from 5 Illinois Universities. The project team is investigating ways institutions with fewer resources can engage successfully in digital preservation. The team is testing different open source processing tools to determine their usability, scalability, and sustainability…all from the perspective of practitioners in the field who likely have smaller budgets, limited IT support, and/or few staff members. The team is also examining how well these tools work with popular back-end, dark archive options like DuraCloud and MetaArchive. At the end of the project, Digital POWRR will deliver detailed tool testing results and recommendations, a template for incremental, practical steps in building awareness and buy-in within smaller organizations, and potential business models for implementing digital preservation solutions at institutions with restricted resources.

Presenters:

Aaisha Haykal, Director of Archives and Special Collections at Chicago State University

Patrice-Andre Prud’homme, Head of Digital Collections at Illinois State University

Slides:LevelsofPreservation digitalpowrr_dp_ala_2013_haykal_prudhomme

Chronicles in Preservation: Preserving Digital News and Newspapers

The Chronicles in Preservation Project is a three-year program funded by the NEH to study, document, and model the curation of digitally preserved newspaper collections, both digitized and born digital. The Chronicles Project is testing and recommending a spectrum of tools and practices from essential to optimal. In this presentation, we will

discuss how the use of open-source tools such as the DAITSS Description Service, UNT’s PREMIS Event Service, and implementations of the BagIt standard can automate the creation and monitoring of foundational digital preservation elements.

Presenters:

Matt Schultz, Program Manager, Educopia Institute

Nick Krabbenhoeft, Project Manager, Educopia Institute

Slides: chronicles_ala2013_20130703

Building a Robust Pipeline for ETD Ingestion with Rich Metadata

Michigan State University (MSU) is using Archivematica and a series of XSLTs to capture rich technical, preservation, and descriptive metadata relating to the preparation and ingest of files into a Fedora Commons Repository. This presentation will talk about the background of this workflow, sources of metadata, metadata transformation, and tools utilized.

Presenter:

Lucas Mak, Metadata and Catalog Librarian at Michigan State University Libraries.

Slides: ETD_metadata

Conferences/Education   Digital Preservation