October 1, 2009 -- Over twenty Library of Congress staff had an opportunity to participate in a special workshop, Digital Preservation Management: Implementing Short-term Strategies for Long-term Problems (external link), hosted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (external link), held September 21-22, 2009 in Washington, DC.
Initially developed at the Cornell University Library and supported with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Digital Preservation Management workshops are structured curricula geared toward managing digital preservation planning and policies for libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions. The goal of the workshop is to provide those managers and staff responsible for digital assets the practical means to exercise stewardship in an age of technological change. Many institutions struggle with the initial stages of developing digital preservation policies, and the workshop aides participants in understanding the fundamental pieces of how to think about and enact planning for organizations.
Nancy Y. McGovern, who has been developing the workshop since 2003 and serves as the director and an instructor of the program, and a team of instructors from the University of Michigan abridged the structured workshop from five days to two for the Library’s special workshop.
The two-day program included presentations, group discussions and exercises intended to enable staff to explore the range of components needed to develop an effective digital preservation program. McGovern described the three core pieces of the program - the organizational infrastructure, technological infrastructure, and requisite resources - as aspects encompassing the full life cycle of digital objects.
Workshop participant Diane Vogt-O'Connor, chief of the Conservation Division, noted that the workshop "was a pragmatic and thorough overview of the needs that repositories have for an effective organizational infrastructure, a functional technological infrastructure, and adequate and proportional staffing and funding resources before they can effectively begin to engage in true digital preservation."
The next five-day workshops will be held October 11-16, 2009 (external link) at the University of Michigan - where Martha Anderson, director of program management for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, will be the keynote speaker - and June 13-18, 2010 at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For more information about the workshops, please visit: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/dpm/workshops/fiveday.html (external link) .
