Digital Preservation Outreach & Education

9/20/2011

Library of Congress To Launch New Corps of Digital Preservation Trainers

The Digital Preservation Outreach and Education program at the Library of Congress will hold its first national train-the-trainer workshop on September 20-23, 2011, in Washington, DC.

The DPOE Baseline Workshop will produce a corps of trainers who are equipped to teach others, in their home regions across the U.S., the basic principles and practices of preserving digital materials. Examples of such materials include websites; emails; digital photos, music, and videos; and official records.

The 24 students in the workshop (first in a projected series) are professionals from a variety of backgrounds who were selected from a nationwide applicant pool to represent their home regions, and who have at least some familiarity with community-based training and with digital preservation. They will be instructed by the following subject matter experts:

• Nancy McGovern, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, University of Michigan
• Robin Dale, LYRASIS
• Mary Molinaro, University of Kentucky Libraries
• Katherine Skinner, Educopia Institute and MetaArchive Cooperative
• Michael Thuman, Tessella
• Helen Tibbo, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Society of American Archivists.

The curriculum has been developed by the DPOE staff and expert volunteer advisors and informed by DPOE-conducted research―including a nationwide needs-assessment survey and a review of curricula in existing training programs. An outcome of the September workshop will be for each participant to, in turn, hold at least one basic-level digital-preservation workshop in his or her home U.S. region by mid-2012.

The intent of the workshop is to share high-quality training in digital preservation, based upon a standardized set of core principles, across the nation. In time, the goal is to make the training available and affordable to virtually any interested organization or individual.

The Library’s September 2011 workshop is invitation-only, but informational and media inquiries are welcome at [email protected].