 preservation. Kristen, please go ahead. Thank you, Mike. This is Kristen Lange at Heritage Preservation. And I'm very pleased to welcome you to today's course, Caring for Digital Materials, Preventing a Digital Dark Age. And as Mike said, we're hoping that our audio is working well today. If you're having any trouble, just drop us a note in the chat box. This is our fourth course in our series, Caring for Yesterday's Treasures Today. And it's a project that's been made possible by a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And we thank them for all their support of the evidence that reason they were able to offer these courses for free of charge to you. And we also want to thank Learning Times, our producer for these courses. Today, we are joined by our speaker, Lauren Goodly. But she is also being supported by our course coordinator, Danielle Plummer. She helps select the topics and the speakers, and you'll be hearing from her in a few more classes. And she'll also help answer any questions you have in our chat box today. As Mike said, we've had tremendous interest in this course. More people are joining as we speak. We're up to over 200 people already today. And you're welcome to continue to say hello while I discover a few course logistics. And then we'll move this away to a Q&A moderated question and answer box. So as I said, today is the first of our five classes in this course, Overview of Digital Preservation with Lauren. And we will have another webinar this Thursday, two more next week, and the final will be on Monday, April the 15th. We have a course web page. And if you haven't already looked at it, this is where you can find a handout with a speaker PowerPoint slides, a link to our homework assignment, a link to resources mentioned in the class, and to further information. We will be eventually posting all the recordings on this page. But until the course is concluded, we'll just be emailing you those recording links. So if you have to miss a class, you can look for that email from us. We usually get it out in a day of each class concluding. And please do note that it comes from heritagepreservation.org. So make sure that's a safe sender for your email. In order to earn a certificate in this class, if you haven't taken a class with us before, I'll just quickly go over those steps. First of all, you needed to have registered. And this is the registration page on our website. So this doesn't look familiar. And you may not have registered. And you should be in touch with us. You should have sent in a permission form that looks like this from your supervisor, giving permission to participate in the course, watch each webinar in the course, either live or by the recording, and complete all five homework assignments. Just so you know, we won't give individual feedback on the homework. But we will look at it between classes and provide general feedback to the group. And although you're not required to work towards a certificate, if you do want to do this, we just ask you complete all the work no later than Monday, April 22. So that's one week after the last class airs. I will make another note on homework. If you, most of our homework assignments are written considering that you work at an institution, at a library, archive, or museum. If that's not your situation, if you're a student or a retiree or you're not currently working at a cultural institution, you can still answer the homework questions just thinking about maybe personal collections that you might have. And in addition to the certificate, we're also really happy to award digital credentials through CRED-LY. And this is a new way of online learning, getting recognition for you. And so we will be sending you information about that when the course concludes as well. Finally, if you are a certified archivist, this class is eligible for archival credits for continuing education. So if you have any additional questions after today's webinar, you can do a couple of things. You can either join the community, which, if you haven't already, is a great resource for links and it gives you access to our discussion page where you can ask your colleagues questions about the circumstance at your institution and also get a question to our speakers. We'll make sure you get an answer on those. Or you can email us at info at heritagepreservation.org. And we can either get you any help you need with these courses or get you connected to our speakers if you have a technical question. So right now I'm going to, with that, speaking of questions and answers, I'm going to be just dragging this low box away. And we're going to transition over to our moderated chat box. So you continue to type in questions if you have any technical issues, any logistical questions, or any subject matter questions. Feel free to continue to type these then. And we will approve your comments if it's something to share with the group. Just keep in mind that you will have your answer, your question might show up twice. And that's just once when you typed it in and once when we published it. So don't worry. You're not making a mistake. That's how it should appear if you type something in and it gets published to the group. OK, with that, I would like to introduce you to our speaker today, Lauren Goodway. She is an archivist at the Texas State University in San Marcos. She is responsible for developing and implementing a digital preservation program for archives, which has included a substantial amount of audio-visual material. She's graduated from the information school at the University of Texas at Austin and has previously worked as an archivist at the Texas General Land Office. She's a certified archivist and will earn a digital archive specialist certificate from the Society of American Archivists in 2013. And as she'll tell you today, she's attended the first Library of Congress digital preservation and education training, the trainer workshop. And that has given her so much great information to share with you today. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Lauren and she will proceed with her PowerPoint from here. Thanks so much. Lauren Goodway, hello. And I'll be here for the next hour or so. Smaller State University, and previously, when I worked at a state agency, I worked on a collaborative digital project with the Public Library and the Museum. So to start, let's take a minute and think about the series on caring for digital collections as a whole, since today will be the introduction and overview. The goals for the series are that participants will have a better understanding of the inherent fragility of digital objects. Participants will acquire information to help them select preservation formats, metadata, and backup systems for digital objects. And participants will be able to apply one or more actions that can be taken to improve their institution's digital preservation efforts. Today, we are doing the introduction, and then there are four more sessions that will go into more details about some of those things I go over today. And I'll be talking about the big picture of you. I'm going to talk about concepts, steps, decision points, and considerations. I will be talking about tools or procedures and answers. And this is partly because this is an overview, and also partly because, much like analog librarianship and preservation, your digital preservation program will be specific to your institution and your materials. So I want to share with you the tools and knowledge to make the best decisions for your materials and your institution for yourself. As can be said, the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Outreach and Education program, or DEPO, was able to attend the first train or workshop that they put on. And the thinking behind DEPO is that in the United States, there are several digital preservation experts who are leaders and needed at individual and simple societies, given to your personal digital archives. The Library of Congress, the Foster National Outreach and Education, to encourage individual content, building on a collaborative network of instructors, contributors, and in the resources on the website, they're repeated again, a lot of great introductory information there. Modules rather than steps because, as we'll see, these are iterative, and they inform each other. You can also come back to these steps when you get stuck, or as you make improvements upon review and grow your digital preservation program. We're actually going to be walking through each of these in the workshop today. Identify what content you have. Next is select what portion of that content you will commit to preserving. And today, we're going to skip these minutes. What issues are there if we want to move on to that? What provisions are needed for long-term management of digital content? And provide what considerations are there for long-term management? And then in about an hour, you will have an understanding of digital content management stages. You'll be able to suggest and implement concrete steps to each stage, and you'll be prepared to get the most out of the upcoming workshop. So let's get started. Module 1, identify what digital content do you have? And again, these are all rhetorical questions. So let's walk through this, how to answer it together. First, why do we identify content? Preservation requires an explicit commitment of resources. You'll need to plan for that. Effective planning is based on knowing the extent of what will be preserved. You'll need to plan for storage, technology, access, the expertise and knowledge that you'll need, and of course, funding. Identifying content is the first step to planning for concurrent and future preservation needs. And as we'll see in the switch module, all digital content in and around an organization will need to be preserved. And explicit inventory is the best way to identify content. And probably have some idea of what materials you have, but you want to get it out of your head and into a format that you can use. That way, your inventory looks like. The content is more important than the file or the format. The format doesn't matter at all. I would recommend that it be as simple as possible. And Excel spreadsheet is great for this. It's a tool that's easy to use, it's easy to do simple computation, sorting, and searching. And you can actually do a lot with it. But do what works for you. If you get a database and you can do that, you can even make a word document just to do what your content wants. And here, I put up an example of an Excel sheet. I'm not sure if you can see it, but if you don't, that's OK because everyone's inventory is going to have different... OK. Let's go back to the first module, maybe. OK. Thank you. OK, I'm going to back up and start again. And hopefully, everybody can get caught up. Can we tell if this sounds better? So the first module that we'll be looking at today is Identify. What digital content do you have? And these are rhetorical questions. So don't answer this now. We're going to walk through this together. Why do we identify content? Preservation requires an explicit commitment of resources. So you'll need to plan for that. Effective planning is based on knowing the extent of what will be preserved. You'll need to plan for storage, technology, and tools, and the expertise and knowledge that you'll need. And of course, funding. So identifying content is the first step to planning for future and current preservation needs. And as we'll see in the select module, not all digital content in and around an organization will need to be preserved. An explicit inventory is the best way to identify content. You probably have some idea of what materials you have, but you want to get it out of your head and into a format you can use. So what should your inventory look like? Inventory content is more important than style and format. In fact, the format doesn't really matter. I would recommend you keep it as simple as possible. An Excel spreadsheet is a great tool for this. It's easy to use. It's easy to do simple computations, sorting, and searches. And you can actually do a lot with it. But do what works for you. If you like databases, you can do that. If you're more comfortable with Word, you can even do it that way. The tool doesn't matter as much. And I'll put an example up. I'm not sure if you can read this. But I kind of hope you can't, because the thing is that everybody's inventory is going to have different elements. It depends on your institution and the characteristics of your materials. They're just not a good template that will work for everyone. But the basic idea is to put a list of your materials along the left and the information about the items across the top in the column. If you can read this, you'll be able to see it for the Larry L. Kane collection, which is, I think, four or five down. I have two lines. And I don't remember why now, but I wanted to handle that portion in two different parts to me because of the format or the right, something. So I entered that twice with different information. There are some columns that look like I thought I needed, but maybe I don't need them or maybe I need to go back and get more information. And I highlighted some spots that I need to come back to. So this is not a pretty document, and it's not a finished, perfect thing. It's a first pass, and I'll come back to this as needed. So what else about the inventory? It should also be documented. It should be usable in a simple format. It needs to be available. So even if your colleagues never look at it, they should know that it's there and be able to access it. The inventory should be scalable as it's an iterative project. Content will be added, and you'll need to make changes and add more descriptive information as you move forward with your digital preservation program. And it should be current, so plan to update it every year maybe, and definitely put a date on the document. This will be main planning document, so it needs to have these attributes. Now inventory scope, to get started, these are the questions you can ask yourself. If you're not at an institution, as Kristen said, think of an institution or type of institution you like or that you're familiar with. The questions that you want to ask yourself are what content are we already preserving, if any? What other digital content do we have? Is there something that's not on our radar right now? What content do or will our producers create? And that's a little archiving vocabulary, but it just means to look forward to anything you might attain in the future. So from digitization projects, records from other departments or from donors, or anything that you can foresee obtaining. Another question is, what content are we required to keep? This would be for government or businesses that have records retention requirements. I'd imagine this might be email correspondence or reports, any of these types of things, which are becoming more and more born digital today. And I'll take a minute to point out that digital simply means materials that were not created in digital format originally. They weren't digitized from something else. They started out as digital photographs or a Word document or something like that. But they're both handled in the same way for preservation purposes. So for our purposes today, it doesn't matter if what you have is born digital or if it was from a digitization project. We'll follow these same steps. And finally, what content do you need to review? What materials do you not have a policy for or need to look more closely at? Continuing with inventory scope, I have a little poll here, which should be coming up. There we go. Take a moment and check the box for any of these that you might have. So rather than just taking a walk through your stacks, you want to see what information you already have about your digital materials. Do you have documentation for records managers out there? You might have a records retention schedule. For librarians and archivists, you have a finding aid or catalog that notes digital material. Has your institution done any digital projects lately? Did you do a genealogy or digitization project two years ago? And if so, what happened to that material? That would go on the list. And finally, places. Do you have optical disks, like DVDs, DCDs, or mobile floppy disks? These might even be labeled and give you that information. Do you have a server? Do you or anyone have archival materials on their desktop computer? Movable hard drives or flash drives? OK, so that gives you an idea of where to start. And we're done with that poll. Great. Thank you, Kristen. So the content categories, you are noticing that we, oh, your inventory should include all relevant institutional records, special collection materials, scholarly content, both licensed and open, research data, and web content. So cast a wide net, and you are not committing to preserving any of this. You just want to make sure that it's on your list, so you can consider it and plan for it if you need to. How detailed should your inventory be? You don't want to get bogged down here. The information you gather will be used as metadata, but it's just for planning now, and it doesn't need to be exact. You can determine the appropriate level of detail for you and your institution. Some factors in deciding this are how much material you have. What is the extent? You might need to start on the collection level or with groups of materials, if you have a lot of digital content, or you might have little enough that you can list on the file or folder level. It will matter where these materials reside. Is any of your material off-site? Perhaps at different offices or agencies, or is it already described? What media is it on and can you get to it? This will make a difference to, of course, you want this to be a doable project. Do you have student workers, or are you on your own? What is your timeframe? You might need to set one for yourself, say to get a first draft by the end of the semester or the fiscal year. How much time can you actually carve out to spend on this? The key point is that you want to do something you can actually accomplish and do the level of description that you can do, and that will be a useful tool for you. So let's take a look at our collections again. This is going to be a poll. And once you see it, you can just check off what digital content you have or expect to have in your collections. Here it comes. Which one is the percentage? Okay, great. So I'm going to go ahead and close that and move on to our next slide, which is another poll and format types. And take a moment for this poll again. It's not truly a poll. I just wanted to give you a little box to check as you think about your format types. What digital formats do you have? Okay, and lots of you are answering that, so that's great. Ooh, everyone has photographs. But those are some questions you can start to ask yourself as you begin your inventory. We're done with that poll. I'm going to go ahead and close it. So you might be starting to have some idea of what information you should collect for your inventory. And these are the columns across the top of your spreadsheet. So so far we've talked about the format and this might be both format types, such as audio or text, and file types, just MP3 or PDF. You already have some content categories. Do you need more detail than that about your content or are those categories enough description for now for you to make your selections? You'll need a date or a date range for the materials. You'll want to note the location, either a physical box or folder, or the file path and server. And you may want to note the size of the items in terms of folders or files. A couple of tips about your inventory. You may have multiple dates, and that's fine. You definitely want to have the date of the inventory and any updates. The date of the files is always useful. The date covered in the content, even if approximate, and the date created and received, if that's relevant to you. Another tip about location. There may be different ways to denote the location. You might want to specify if it's in an online or offline location. You could give it a general location with us or with the creator or in a different department. And you may need to change locations with the content moves and keep up with that on your inventory. So as with all of your inventory, be clear enough without going too extreme. So what are our outcomes for this first section? Identify potential digital content you may need to preserve. Treat your inventory as a management tool that grows as your program grows. And you can use it as a planning tool to prepare for future staffing needs, training, and the annual growth. It provides a basis for acquiring content, defining submission agreements, and collection plans. And at this point, we'll see if we have any questions from the group. It looks like we have one from Melissa in Connecticut. Are we talking? Oh, sorry. That's fine, go ahead. Oh, okay. Yeah, go ahead. So are we talking about only digital materials that are accessioned or also files like photographs of artifacts and deeds of gift? I would, if that's up to you, if it were me, I would include all of this in my inventory. Even if you decide that you don't need to save your deeds of gift in perpetuity or if those are private materials that will never be put online, you may decide that you want to include that in your preservation program. So that's your call. I would say cast a really wide net at this point and then we'll fine-tune it and focus as we move forward. And then actually, Melissa had a follow-up too. She said, can you print a sitemap for your computer files or must it be compiled by hand? I'm going to bet that there's a fancy tool out there for that. And I think it's not this session, but the next one is going to be talking about file types. The number fourth, Danielle saying that the fourth session will go into more detail about tools and those things. I can just say that I know that they're out there and that is a great thing for you to learn and look into as you move forward with your materials. And would also be an example of something that one person might need to do and someone else can do differently and how these documents will turn out, different for everyone. Okay, and if we hunt down some great resources, that's something we will post to the course site. Okay. Oh, okay. And I kind of, Danielle's saying that someone asked about born digital and I did skip over that to try to catch up on time. All that we need to know at this point is that born digital means something that's not digitized. So like a Word document or a piece, is something that was created in a digital format and there's no, it's not a surrogate for something else. And that gets dropped a lot and that term gets used a lot. And so, but for our purposes today, whether it's born digital as a Word document or if it was a scanned from a handwritten paper, right now it doesn't matter. We're talking about any digital content that you may have. Okay. And let's take, oh, go ahead. Do you want to take a Mary question before we go on? Yeah, just quickly, because this is getting, I want to move forward, but at this, yeah. Yeah, it's kind of up to you. I'm gonna have to think about this one for a minute. The, in this case, I would not actually, I would have, I would say, treat this as your collection of this video collection and then say that you have DV tape, DV cam tape and the digital format. That's how I would handle it, would be to keep it together. Okay, and just, I just want for the closed captioning, I want to read the question out loud. So Mary had said we have DV cam tapes that were digitized. The tapes are cataloged. Do you recommend creating separate records for the digitized version? So it's a good question, and if we don't answer it fully throughout the rest of the webinar, we'll make sure we get an answer out to you all. Okay, do you want to go ahead? But for now I'm saying no. Sure, okay. I have a couple of resources here, and then these are listed on the website as well. And we'll move on to module two. This is selection. What portion of that content will be preserved? So why do we select content to preserve? As you may know, storage may be cheap, but management is not. Particularly when you're looking 10 or 20 years ahead with staff turnover and changing technology. So if you've heard the phrase free like beer or free like puppies, storage is definitely free or cheap like puppies. The quality of content, maybe you don't need to spend resources preserving everything that you might have. Discovery and dissemination services. What do you have available as far as what you can manage, search for and provide in your current system? And matching mission to content. This is going to help you make your case for your program and what resources you need. You'll be documenting and showing how your digital preservation program supports your institution's mission. And a note about terms. We use different terms in different domains, but these modules apply to any institution no matter the size or the type. So in archives we might say appraisal and scheduling. In libraries we might say selection and museums use acquisition. And they're common outcomes. So we're going to use just select for the rest of this course. What are the steps for selection? You'll want to define and apply selection criteria. You'll want to document and preserve your selection decisions. And you'll want to implement those decisions. So let's look at some selection criteria examples. We want to get this down on paper. Creating explicit criteria for selection will make it possible to be more systematic and consistent in your program. So you might have an acquisition or collection development policy that you can use for your digital selection criteria. You might have departmental criteria, either priorities or precedents for what's important. There might be core record or content types that you don't need to review, say from your founder or important community record. Research criteria, what is of interest to your users and what content has high research value? Is it unique? Is it the only copy or source of the material? And what about value? Whatever value means to your institution? And again, look at whether materials are preserved elsewhere. You don't want to duplicate your efforts. If you have a large amount of material, you may need to prioritize your inventory before reviewing it. And these priorities are also a chance to be strategic in your selection for preservation. Think about your stakeholders. Pick someone important to resource allocators, such as significant material or president's addresses. Or choose items that are often requested or something flashy or interesting for your users. You could prioritize an easy collection, something with similar file formats or something that you've worked with before. So in that instance, think low hanging fruit or an easy win. Or you may want to tackle an extensive collection first and you may have legal requirements or mission mandates to attend to. So think about what will have impact for your institution. These considerations are what I think of as showstoppers. You should not select materials for preservation if any of these criteria apply. So the content is important. It should match your value scope and mission. Remember that you don't have to preserve everything that you have. Technical, can you do it? For example, do you have space for video files and are you knowledgeable about video formats? If not, then maybe you don't select video right now, but use this information to plan to request more space or more training or to find space or someone who knows how to handle this. Access is another consideration. At my institution, this is not actually a showstopper because we do have restricted collection that may be opened at a later date. On the other hand, if you're a public library with a mandate to provide access to your materials, then something you don't own copyright on and can't provide may not be a good use of your resources. So you can decide whether online access is an important consideration for you. You may need to look at donor agreements and copyright at this point. And you can use these criteria to add language to your acquisition and appraisal policies to include digital materials so you get things that you can handle. I'm gonna switch gears a little here because I'm sure most of us are familiar with choosing materials from our collections. And I wanna talk about digital preservation as a team effort. You simply can't be an expert in everything, especially in this field. It's so vast and technology changes quickly and often. So even if you're a one person department, for example, you won't be writing code or developing storage systems, but you will need to know what questions to ask the vendors and the people that you're working with. We can also develop relationships with our donors and depositors as they have information about their digital materials. So we're gonna bring up another poll and only a poll in the sense that I wanted to give you some boxes to check and think for a minute about who would be on your dream team? Who can help you as you move forward? Everybody's saying IT staff, I love it. I have a colleague here that says that whenever she talks to IT, she brings chocolate because they are our best friends sometimes. But okay, we're gonna go ahead and close this poll and move on. And as we go forward and as you go forward with your program, it's always good to think about who you can have on your side and who can add to your program. Switching back to think about our inventory again. At this point, you may need to add information to your inventory, add some documentation there. Do, does it include the selection criteria that you decided upon? Do you need more information at a more granular level than you originally thought? You might need a better count of size to start to crunch numbers and get estimates for how many files, folders, and the total storage size, especially for materials that you do select for preservation. You may need to add information about access and use. Make sure you understand the copyright issues and whether you are able to preserve and provide access. There are lots of opportunities here to learn and to use the expertise of your colleagues, so don't be afraid to branch out and ask questions and ask for help here. So what are our outcomes for this module? You should now know how to gain control of possible content for planning purposes and where to start to begin to develop a sustainable program. As far as deliverables, after selection you'll have an expanded inventory of digital content with metadata. You may have agreements with producers, such as retention schedules, acquisition lists, submission agreements, and deeds of gift that include digital materials. And you should have more team members and stakeholder buy-in for your program at this point. I'll take a break and see if there are any questions at this point. Thanks so much, Lauren, but you don't have any additional questions right now. We just wanna welcome people who are now just joining us and we wanna apologize for any delay you might have experienced. Let's see, Celia says, regarding the dream team poll, I would welcome suggestions for coping when one doesn't have a dream team. What if IT and resource allocators aren't keen or don't understand? I know that's a really, that's an elaborate challenge to have to overcome, but do you have any tips? Yeah, and maybe I just like the challenges, but I think that people will, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people had this challenge, and I'm glad you said this too, Celia, because I didn't mention it in my presentation, but developing relationships with IT is especially important and especially tricky because we use different vocabulary and we have different ways of thinking about things and we just have totally different backgrounds and ways of coming at a question, which sometimes can be really good, because they have a lot of expertise and information that we need, but there's a lot of sort of mutual sharing of information and getting a relationship with somebody and knowing what questions to ask them and how much to share about your program is really good. So I'm not sure if that's much of an answer or just saying that it's tricky and something that will be worth the effort of spending time on. And then Melissa had another question, what if there's a staff of four and no other IT people except for a contracted internet provider? Sure, this is Danielle and Lauren just threw this one over to me. There are a number of people out there who work as independent consultants who might be able to help you and some of the ways to learn about those, we're gonna have some resources on the website, including email lists that include the archives and archivist lists and other places. When you have questions, feel free to go ahead and ask them there and see if there's anyone there who can help you either for free or as a consultant who gets paid for that. So that's one way to solve those problems if we're a really small shop, we just don't have the local expertise. Yeah, and thank you, Robert, for mentioning. He has found great resources through the Association of Moving Image Archivists. So let's see, we had a question from Stephanie about sample donor agreement for born digital content. If you're aware of those resources, Lauren, we can put the links up on the site. Yes, and I know that they are out there. Some of the movers and shakers are really good about posting all of their documentation. And sometimes that can get a little over my head for sure, but yes, we can get a sample donor agreement up. Okay, and then there was a request also from Marcia about that Excel spreadsheet if you're inventory. Maybe we'll just ask you for that as a handout when you post that as well, so it's unreadable. I might, Marcia, but it's really, I'm just hesitant because I wouldn't want anyone to just copy straight off when it's, but yeah, we can do that. And then it seems like we got a little chat going about refurbished equipment for digital preservation. Some folks are helping to answer Janine's question. Oh, great. She had a question about refurbished equipment. I've had really good luck with that. Similar to what somebody said about the technical listservs being really useful, vendors can have a lot of information about digitization. So I've gotten help from them and I think just doing Google searches will turn up places that do refurbished micro cassette players is what we bought. Okay, well, I see a few more questions. Why do you keep going? And then we will make sure to grab them and get to them at the end if we haven't answered them already. Okay, thanks. Sure, thank you. So here are a couple of resources, the networking and listservs and somebody also mentioned some of the more technical listservs. And then there's a digital preservation management tutorial online. So let's find our spot. We went over identify what digital content you have and select what portion of that content will be preserved. We're going to skip the store and protect for later sessions and we're going to move on to manage and provide. Manage is what provisions are needed for long-term management and provide is what considerations are there for long-term access. Module five, what provisions are needed for long-term management? So first I want to point out this report preserving digital information which represents a seminal moment in digital preservation practice. And this was published in 1996. So that's a while ago now. And good practice for digital preservation has been emerging since then. In fact, digital preservation has been an organized practice since the 1970s with NASA and the scientific community and then in the 1980s with government records. So all this means that at this point we do have common practice emerging around management of digital preservation programs. Digital preservation management can be represented as a three-legged stool and the three legs are organizational, technical and financial. Effective management includes organizational requirements and objectives so as the health of the institution and the digital preservation program within that institution. It includes technological opportunities and change and it includes resources such as funding, staff and equipment. Which of these do you think institutions tend to focus on? Well, that would be technology which is understandable as technology is a bit more tangible and has yes, no questions and solutions. But as a field we need to push ourselves to be sure to include organizational health and financial resources in our digital preservation programs. We're moving away from one-time digitization projects and into digital preservation programs. So let's think about your team again. It's just you, what skills do you need in your institution for this program? So you'll need policy development, program management, repository, software management or programming, metadata management, legal expertise and marketing expertise. So if you're working alone these are some of the things you'll be doing. Now you might be using a service for example contracting someone to set up your digital repository system or purchasing one but all of these skills are needed somewhere in your program. What about policies? A preservation policy has the benefit of specifying and really nailing down institutional commitment, developing and writing the policy can also be a team-building exercise to get by and across the organization. A policy will demonstrate compliance with good practice for your community and it can help you manage expectations. For example, not everything will be put online perhaps and this is a chance to say that. A policy can help you identify issues and challenges, specific areas where you're weak. It will raise awareness of your digital preservation program and also define roles and responsibilities within your organization. As far as technology, organizations do need to regularly invest in technologies that will help them preserve digital content such as computers and servers, software tools and utilities, repository software packages. The process should be systematic and intentional. So outsourcing to vendors and service providers is increasingly an option and these decisions should be as thoughtful as the process to buy and implement technology. You should prioritize your needs and requirements for technology. You should then assess the technology, set up steps to meet your goals, include funding decisions. Will you own, join or share and collaborate on resources? Anticipate, use your inventory and selection documents to anticipate needs. Look around and see what technology is emerging and evaluate choices. So invest in technology wisely. Don't give in to the temptation to throw technology at your materials. When looking at software, there's a couple things to remember. You should be sure it will work on widely used operating systems and be well supported by either the community or the developers. So having a community of practice or many institutions using the software is often a good sign. And the third leg of the stool is funding. So identifying funding for digital preservation can be challenging, but any program in an organization needs sustained funding to develop and grow. Designated funding ensures that funds are set aside for digital preservation. It also indicates a measurable indication of intent to preserve, so it sends a message to stakeholders. It's challenging, but over time, funding contributes to your track record and reputation. Funding can be explicit, such as a line item in the budget, but even if you don't have a line item, you'll need to make sure that your program has funding. Also important is succession planning. So you should be willing to appoint an institution to take over your materials should something drastic occur and means for the program to continue should your job or duties change. Kristen, should I stop for questions now or press the head? We do have a lot of questions, but I do don't want you to run out of time, so why don't you push ahead right now? Okay, and then we'll follow the end. Okay, thanks. Sure. Okay, so earlier I was talking about digital preservation standards. The digital community now has a foundation of standards as basis for good practice. These include trustworthy digital repositories, OAIS, or Open Archival Information Systems reference model, which is now an ISO standard. Also preservation metadata, implementation strategies, or premise. And recently there is a checklist for trustworthy repositories audit and certification, or track. So these are standards you should know about and you can work towards conformance. These attributes of a trustworthy digital repository have been used since 2002 by organizations to guide the development of their digital preservation program. So as we go through, maybe think about characteristics that your organization already has. You can start to write this down in your preservation program plan and flesh them out in policies and procedures as you go. Community standards. You can commit today to complying to OAIS and put this in your policy statement. Commitment or administrative responsibility. I'm guessing that your institutions support you being at this webinar and maybe have tasked you with digital preservation. So that's a commitment already. Management, how viable is your organization? If dismantling is a possibility, do you have a succession plan? Resources. Web funding has already been designated for digital preservation. As far as infrastructure, what technology do you already have? For example, servers or scanners. What type of security system do you have as far as logins and passwords? What about locked doors? And documentation. As you move forward, it's important for you to document your policies to ensure procedural accountability. So your institution may have some of these characteristics already. You just need to make it explicit for your digital program documentation. You can use these characteristics to explain your program to potential donors and other stakeholders. And the final session of this series will go over these standards more. Gap analysis is a great management tool at this point. You can ask, where are we? Where do we want to be? As far as community standards and requirements that we just looked at. And therefore, what do we need to work on? So outcomes for the management piece include thinking about what will standards, conformance, and good practice look like for your organization. And how will your organization demonstrate good practice? I'm gonna go ahead and move on to the last section, module six, and then we'll have questions after that. Module six is provide. What considerations are there for long-term access? Well first, what is long-term access? Preservation does make long-term access possible. I tend to use the term long-term access in place of preservation when I'm talking to certain stakeholders. But I need to remember that there are major differences. Preservation relies on proven, reliable, and even stodgy technologies to preserve digital objects across generations of technology. Access relies on cutting-edge technologies to provide the best and fastest access at a point in time. Preservation accumulates metadata over the lifecycle to trace and preserve content and access selects metadata needed to use and understand content. Preservation systems create new versions of digital objects as needs and technology change over time and access systems deliver the most appropriate version at any given time. The purpose of preservation is to ensure long-term access and the purpose of access systems is to provide content to users. And of course the focus of preservation is future users and the focus of access to current users. So you can think of these as two different systems. And we can think about how access informs a preservation program and of course how the end result is access. So when thinking about providing content as part of your preservation plan, you want to be sure that content will be delivered to users over time in these ways. It should be delivered easily using current and known technologies. It should be coherent, well-documented and presented. It should be complete, intact, and well-formed. It should be rendered correctly, accurately representing deposits. It should be reliable using well-managed technologies, consistent in accordance with policies, and fairly with equity and precedent. So this is also not new, but it might be new thinking about digital materials in this way. Organizational or institutional responsibilities for providing access include developing and maintaining comprehensive access policies. Policies make consistent, sustainable access possible over time and ad hoc decisions do not. You'll want to manage preservation and access in parallel. Transparency and compliance surrounding access are important, so having clear, well-documented decisions, providing content to current and future users, adapting new technologies for discovery and delivery, and managing legal issues throughout the life cycle. So what issues might you encounter around access to digital materials and how might you solve these issues? Who is allowed to have access to content? Are access policies equal for all content? If not, how are the categories managed? How are exceptions or special requests handled? How do users request or get access? And what options do users have? So consider using an FAQ as a step to developing policies. And you can also think about how these issues can be handled via technology and how they can be handled through policies and what sort of combination it will take to manage these access policies. Implementation, access decisions should be documented and translated into policy statements. Access policies should address requirements for preservation systems to produce access objects. Access policies should reflect and respond to new delivery discovery issues that emerge. And preservation systems and procedures should incorporate and reflect access policies and decisions. And what are the different roles involved for providing content? These include access service managers who define services, policy developers who are needed to capture access decisions, access system developers or purchasers to enact decisions, and access systems managers need to monitor and respond to the system. Users support staff systems to assist users, system administrators to manage the environment, and users of content to understand and follow the rules. And again, if you're the only person on your digital preservation program, these are the hats you'll be wearing. Or think of it as a checklist for what roles and actions you'll need to take. When thinking about access, what do we know about our users? It may be possible to track and respond to current users. And find out who they are. How do we either through user surveys or usage information from your system? How do we anticipate needs of future users? Well, that's tricky, right? So user expectations are driven by delivery and discovery technologies that they know and want. And we can't predict future technologies. So that's a balance that we need to manage and be aware of. Preservation provides a pathway from one generation of technology to the next so that we can use these future tools. So how should digital content be packaged for delivery at specific points over time? What about sustainable access? Effective and sustainable digital participation programs address the value they understand and stress content value, the roles they identify stakeholders and involve them in the process. Incentives, they identify carrots for preservation and they identify and address cost across the lifecycle. So what are our goals for the PROVIDE module? We should have clear access policies that address long-term access. We should have links between preservation and access over time that ensure current access and long-term access. We should have the capacity to create dissemination packages from preservation packages using current technologies and an awareness of and control over relevant rights management issues from creation or deposit forward. So that is the end of my presentation and I would encourage you to take a minute now to think about three things that you can do to work on your institution's digital preservation program right now. Just to write down three things that are steps that you can take. And I'll be glad to answer these questions that are coming up. I have a few more resources listed here and on the website. Great, thank you so much, Lauren. I just wanted to just recap a couple of questions and then some responses that Danielle gave regarding copyright. So Cindy said, does anyone have any legal resources for knowledge about copyright issues? And we shared the link in the chat and we'll do so on the website for Peter Hurdle's book. She was also looking just for some specifics and Danielle was saying it might be necessary to actually control to a lawyer. But in general, Danielle was saying that just because you digitize something doesn't give it a new copyright. If it was in public domain before the digitized copy's still public. And if you only copyright to the original item, then you own the copyright to the digitized copy. We weren't gonna get into huge amounts of conversation about copyright on this. But again, if we find good resources, we will make sure to put it on the site because we know it's a complex issue. And I think that pretty much answered Janine's question about their policy to put a copyright tag on all the digitized content that they create. Do you have any two cents to throw into that conversation, Lauren? No, I don't, just that it is important to start thinking about copyright as early as possible in the process and any answer to these questions, yeah. Okay. And then do you see Maggie Mueller's question about privacy? Yes. Could you read that out loud and then give your reply? Sure, yeah, yeah. So Maggie is asking, as an academic institution, we have digital materials that are covered by FERPA. Preservation is important for these records, but due to privacy, the records don't end up in the archives. Should they end up on the inventory? I'm sorry, someone's gonna have to help me out with FERPA. Is it the, yeah. Is that for the student record? And so I'm guessing that these would be on our records attention schedule and they would be destroyed at some point, is that right? Or are they kept in perpetuity? They're just private. But either way, if it were me, I would definitely put it on the inventory because even if it's something that you need to keep for 20 years, you don't wanna put it on a CD and walk away from it. Like you're gonna need to have preservation management tool for it, even if you're only gonna keep it for five or 10 years. So I would put it on the inventory and then have a column that says, what's the retention period on this? And I think that came up recently on our online community with some questions someone had about medical records as well. Yes, and this is Danielle. I just wanted to add the book by Peter Hurdle has been mentioned on the Q&A and someone actually posted the link. We're gonna add that to your resources page. But if I remember correctly, he actually does go into both FERPA educational and medical resources to give you a little bit of guidance about how to deal with those. That is an ongoing issue that not just copyright, but privacy, which is also a federal law, is something you need to consider for making materials publicly available. Great, so we have some questions about older technology. And so saving older technology in case you might need to use it, pulling data off, five and a quarter inch floppies. Fun stuff. Fun stuff, so I'm not sure other speakers will be getting into this in more detail, but do you have any information with them? Yeah, I'm gonna pass it to Danielle in just a moment because I'm sure that we will be talking about it later in the series. But my first thought is that this is a good chance to collaborate with others. Like Eumatic Tapes is a good example. Those players are hard to find. Well, I'm sure in Austin somebody has a Eumatic Tape player. So my preference instead of keeping one myself and keeping it up to date and working is I would try to partner with somebody. But yeah, that's definitely something that would be helpful for your program. So this is Danielle again. And just to speak about the technology, although we will touch on this a little bit in session two and perhaps a little bit in session four as well. This is one of the most vexing issues of preserving digital materials, is finding original hardware that works. So several email lists have been mentioned as resources. Among the good ones, Amia has been mentioned. The Association of Moving Image Archivists. The Association for Recorded Sound Collections is another really good one. And the Archives and Archivists list, I also see these to come up occasionally on the museum L list. People who are saying I need this type of technology, does anyone have it available? So this is one way to try to find this. Robert has mentioned, Robert Riles has mentioned a few times on the Q&A about vendors and learning how to evaluate vendors. This is an ongoing issue. And something that you might wanna consider is again asking for opinions on any of these discussion lists. These are lists of your peers. There are also vendors who are signed up for those lists and they may try to promote themselves, but you can get honest opinions often by private reply. So various things that you can do to try to manage the technological hurdles, we're not gonna address all of those issues in this series because we couldn't. It would take a really long time and it's just an ongoing issue. So just remember to don't stop your education with this series, keep looking for additional resources going forward. Thanks, Danielle. Let's see, I don't know, Lauren, if you're familiar with past perfect software that museums use for cataloging museum collections and that stores digital images as well. So did you see Lin's question today? I am looking at Lin's question and she's saying that they don't have digital content now but they're planning on scanning and digitizing. And she says that she's concerned with dealing with preservation now at the point of creation, which is perfect. That's when you want to start being concerned about it. So are there available samples of ways to organize records in online formats? And I think someone suggested that the past perfect company is actually, I've always understood it, to have very good customer support and that they host webinars and they may be a resource for information specifically for this case. Okay, yeah, I think that, yeah, I find a bit, I think she's on the right track to find out the answers now as far as duplicating efforts like re-entering metadata maybe, making sure that she captures all the preservation metadata that she needs now, you know, that she'll need in the future to handle that the first time around. Great. And then while I have you, could you just give a quick definition for metadata? It'll be covered next week's webinar in better detail but just- Yeah, I wish I knew who it was asking because it's such a funny word. It can also, it's the same thing as cataloging to me. It technically means data about data. So any information that you need about your information object. So a really simple example is that you might have a title author subject and in the digital realm, we would call that metadata. Then you'll also have technical metadata. So you might wanna know what the file type is and the size and what year, what version of software it uses. There's also preservation metadata. And the categories are not as important but making sure that you have the information that you need to go forward about your materials. And I think there is a whole session on metadata, so. There is, and in fact, actually, I'm gonna pull it over now that we mentioned it but that is one of your homework questions is to begin to think about information that might be important when you inventory your collection. So. Right, and then that will be your metadata or the beginnings of it. It could definitely reuse it. Yeah, so it's a great question and it's gonna come up a lot. So Maria had asked if there are sample preservation policies, digital preservation policies available. And yeah, did you wanna go ahead? Go ahead. There is in the tutorial kind of that is in the digital preservation management tutorial which is in the resources, it walks you through that. And there are lots of preservation policies available. I know people are asking for lots of samples so I'm sure that we'll come up with them for the website after we've had a chance to look for them. I just wanna warn that most of the preservation policies that are available are things that Stanford put online. Well, that's not really all that much useful to me, honestly, those are huge organizations that just have very different needs and ways of meeting those needs. So I'm gonna think some more but I would recommend that tutorial at first as a simple way to sort of walk through the policies and the documentation that you'll need. Great. And then Robert asked a great question about the advantages and disadvantages of using open soft software for content management. But I think Danielle had said that we definitely will be getting into that in more detail in some later webinars. Yeah, and Danielle's whispering to me free as in puppies and I tend to agree with her my get reaction call on this is to pay for something upfront that you'll get the support for. Open source can be really hard to deal with if you have limited IT staff. You end up spending all of your time learning how to work the system or what's wrong with it and you don't have any support. So my major reaction is yeah, explore your options and if there are a lot of people using this whatever software platform you're thinking about like dSpace is an open source but there's vendors who will do the customization for you. So you can work out arrangements like that to where you're not stuck with managing this open source software that doesn't have any support with it. Great. I don't know if you wanna pass it to Danielle. I'm not sure if she's seen other questions that I have not caught. There was a good exchange more about privacy and records and records for attention. And I think basically we've satisfied that conversation. I just wanna make sure we've got everybody. Yeah, this has been a whole series of questions in the Q&A and I don't know that we can give you all of the answers because some of this is gonna be very institution-specific. And it basically comes down to how to interpret the Federal Educational Resources Privacy Act. Which I think is the name of the Act for FERPA. In some cases institutions handle these resources by actually destroying them. If the resource no longer exists, it is private. In other cases, they do save it and it does become an archival record and they assume that at some point the restrictions of the Act are satisfied and they don't have to worry about it so much. But again, this is something that your institution needs to develop a very specific policy for. And you may need to get legal advice. There are lawyers who specialize in intellectual property. Many educational institutions have such lawyers on staff either at the, in like the president's office or at the systems level. And you might have to pay a fee to consult with them but they're the ones you really need to be talking to to help you get these very specific nitty gritty details. We can't really give you legal advice in this sort of a session. None of us are lawyers. So again, I don't want to mislead you in any way. So if we're being a little vague, that's probably the answer as to why. Okay, I've just now seen a few more questions and just to let you know, we're trying to keep up with the questions but there are an awful lot of folks here and I know that we've missed it. Feel free to repeat it if we haven't gotten to you. And I did want to just, while Danielle's reading some of those questions, just want to say all of this will be recorded. We'll have the transcript from the closed captioning. So if you had to join us late, you can see that. We'll be emailing all registered participants a link to the recording and we will edit out some of the bad audio that we experienced at the beginning of this session and we'll also be getting an answer on, I think what probably happened at the beginning of our session is our website crashed because we had so many people that were interested in logging on today. So we will be troubleshooting that and making sure that Thursday's webinar goes more smoothly but I do apologize if you had to come in late and we'll do our best to work through all these kinks. So thank you. Did you have any more questions, Danielle? Again, I think that there's a very specific question about Archon versus Archivist Toolkit. Will other people in the Q&A handle that? That gets a little bit out of scope for what we're doing today. There's been a discussion on one of the SAA member lists about the archive-based support policies that have been addressed and I don't think we need to get into that too closely right at the moment. Any other specific questions? Feel free to repeat them because it's a little bit difficult to go back and see some of them. And I will say that the chat's been great and we will probably just clean it up but also just pull out any good links and advice that you all share with each other. We really thank you for sharing that and make sure that it's put on the course website along again with the transcript from today's session. And the PowerPoint presentation is also a handout on the site, so we'll make sure that's up there too in case we move quickly through some of these slides because they were so informative. Yes, and again, thank you. The people who are posting links and information in the Q&A, that is a great way. We really love to see you guys helping each other. We are not the absolute end-all-be-all last words on this, although, again, I want to remind you that there are four more sessions. We've got some great speakers coming up and hope that you can make all of them for answers to more detailed questions. So on Thursday, we have a session that will address digitization and digital formats in some depth. Then next week we have sessions on metadata and sessions on backup and general IT issues and then we'll wrap up the series with a session on using networked repositories and other ways of ensuring that your resources can be preserved into the future. That's great. You've seen on the screen, Lauren had finished her PowerPoint, by the way. A link to the homework assignment and it's just a place if you watched with a colleague, let us know who that colleague is. If you came by yourself, we know who you are. We have that recorded already, but let us know so we can give your colleague credit for having attended. And again, we will keep watching our website and we will make sure that information we share today will be posted there. You can always email us at info at heritagepreservation.org and we'll make sure to get anything you need to you. Thanks again to Lauren and to Danielle and to Learning Times and I think we'll wrap up for today, but we'll keep the chat open for a few more minutes. Thanks again and we'll see you Thursday at 2 o'clock Eastern time.