November 7th marks World Digital Preservation Day. Coordinated by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), this international day of advocacy and conversation focuses on how individuals, community groups, and institutions across the planet are working together to preserve digital culture and content in all its forms. This year, World Digital Preservation Day adopted the theme of “Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities.” This theme prompts us to reflect on the importance of collaborative communities of practice when it comes to safeguarding our digital heritage. As we celebrate and participate in this global initiative, Dartmouth Libraries is excited to mark a significant milestone in its own digital preservation evolution. By year’s end, we’ll wrap up the first phase of an ambitious project to develop a renewed and comprehensive digital preservation strategy, which will shape how we care for our digital material.
Dartmouth Libraries Digital Preservation Strategy Project
(Nearly) A Year of Innovation & Collaboration
The Digital Preservation Strategy Project involves assessing the work we have already done and are currently doing. The project also looks ahead to determine how Dartmouth Libraries can improve and grow its capacity for stewarding Dartmouth’s digital content in a technologically evolving and nimble world. The primary goal of our recent initiative is to create a robust, scalable digital preservation program that supports the vast and growing range of digital assets held by Dartmouth Libraries. From digitized historical manuscripts to cutting-edge research data and multimedia content, our digital collections are vital to academic scholarship and historical record-keeping.
Ensuring that these digital objects remain accessible and intact is at the heart of our strategy and in concert with the Libraries’ broader strategic initiative to accelerate the sharing of advanced research, scholarship, and other digital creative outputs at Dartmouth and beyond. To achieve this, we reviewed our content, interrogated the difference between digital asset management and preservation, evaluated our storage capabilities, looked ahead to the types of content that we might collect in the future, and drafted policies.
The strategy project also showcases how Dartmouth Libraries’ ongoing commitment to digital preservation has roots in a collective ethos. It involves ongoing collaboration with stakeholders across the libraries and Dartmouth more broadly: digital archivists, IT professionals, collection managers, librarians, associate deans, and more have all participated.
We also partnered with Global Archivist LLC, a leading consulting firm in the field of digital preservation. Nance McGovern, Dartmouth Libraries’ main point person at Global Archivist, wrote a fantastic blog post for World Digital Preservation Day, which calls on people to consider their roles and responsibilities in the digital preservation sphere. Together, we created a renewed local community invested in devising a strategic framework for digital preservation at Dartmouth, one that addresses our current needs and anticipates future priorities.