 Hello, I am Anne Whiteside, Assistant Dean for Information Services at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I am joined here by my colleagues Stephen Abrams, Head of Digital Preservation in Harvard Library, and Sarah Rogers, Digital Archivist at Loeb Library. We are pleased and excited to share with you information about this project. Building for Tomorrow, Collaborative Development of Sustainable Infrastructure for Architectural Design Documentation was an IMLS awarded grant, and we are grateful to IMLS for supporting the work of the grant to further the area of digital design preservation, as it is a particularly thorny issue of digital preservation that is only now beginning to be addressed and in only a few institutions. We will each provide information about the work of the grant, share the outcomes of our work, and highlight some of the larger issues still to be addressed in order to move this work forward. The use of 2D and 3D CAD and building information modeling software is now routine in architecture and design firms. The challenge is that the number of data files created for each design project can be enormous. The resulting data files become obsolete very quickly due to continuous upgrading of software. For designers and for architectural archives and museums, the ability to preserve the data files and make them continually accessible and usable as originally created data is therefore a huge challenge. The timing of this presentation coincides with the recent digital preservation coalition report on the 2021 Global List of Digitally Endangered Species, in which 3D CAD for design and engineering is listed at the top of the list. Work on preservation of these types of data files has been ongoing for more than a decade and this grant work is part of a larger picture of work that needs to be done collaboratively due to the size and scope of the problem. Because the scope of the problem is so large, the Building for Tomorrow grant was conceived to identify collaborative ways to address the preservation of this content. In April 2018, a national forum was held in conjunction with the Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference, where stakeholders including architects, architectural historians, archivists, librarians, technologists and digital preservationists met to frame a collaborative infrastructure to support the long-term preservation of digital design data. The outcome was a plan of action that is really a strategic plan in nature, a multifaceted list of projects and associated tasks. In 2019, the Harvard team engaged a portion of the CAD software vendor community to a series of interviews. The interviews covered questions related to the software development, interoperability, exportability, use of free readers of the software, archiving of software and the vendor's future views of software products. The interviews allowed us to understand the perspective of the vendors to identify where we might be able to find common places to connect vendors, designers and archivists. We also began pilot projects with the Sasaki design firm and the Howler & Neune architecture firm, both Boston-based firms, working with them on in-process design projects. The first part of the work was learning about how designers work on projects and with their colleagues, especially around the generation and sharing of the data files they produce, which helped us to understand how we would need to think about preservation and the intellectual property issues that rise to the surface. In 2020 and 2021, the focus has been on developing preservation recommendations that address the preservation of the original files and the ability to experience those files appropriately to the software from which they are created and investigation into the intellectual property issues and collections of design records and the impact on eventual collecting institutions. A white paper produced in June 2021 includes further recommendations on many different aspects of the work involved in archiving digital design files. In November 2020, we hosted a virtual meeting of a broad spectrum of stakeholder communities and worked with the group through the spring of 2021. Stakeholder groups included representatives from the software industry, standards, archival institutions, national memory institutions, archival systems, historians, design firms and facilities managers. The goals of the meeting were to identify key impediments to the effective and sustainable long-term preservation of architectural and design assets and to offer concrete recommendations for best practices, to strengthen understandings between stakeholders regarding their different perspectives and their goals, to identify and refine concrete activities the stakeholders will engage in to forward the general preservation aims and the specific recommendations we are providing. The outcomes of the meeting included agreement on principles for preservation of digital architectural and design assets including a clear focus on the preservation of meaningful experiences of architectural design information which implicitly encompasses concern for both authentic digital assets and the intermediating software necessary for use and reuse of those assets, an action plan for encouraging and supporting adoption across stakeholder communities and concrete recommendations for best practices. The meeting resulted in the formation of four subgroups that focused on work that would support the emerging recommendations. One subgroup focused on identifying ISO and other informal standards that support the work of designers through the design lifecycle and have impact on the archiving of the digital data in the future. A second subgroup worked to establish a set of file transfer guidelines and resources to facilitate preparation of content to transfer from a designer to an archive. A third subgroup worked on developing a resource list of recommended principles to guide implementation and document a spectrum of practices and software tools and platforms for small or low resourced archives, federal or other very specific or regimented archives and broader more highly resourced archives. A fourth subgroup was identified to focus on access and due to time constraints was not pursued and is identified as a topic requiring further work. I am now turning this over to Steven to share deeper level information about our recommendations. Thank you. Over the past two years we've worked on guidance based on long-standing archival principles and practices including various standards for records management, preservation systems and trusted repositories. These provide a comprehensive framework for the technical and programmatic aspects of archival processing and long-term preservation. Much of our work has been in particularizing these general precepts to the specific case of architectural design data. For that purpose we look back on prior research findings such as the MIT facade project and the Library of Congress's architecture design and engineering summit as well as extensive new stakeholder consultation with architectural practitioners, historians and scholars, faculty and students, facilities managers, archivists and technologists through both individual interviews as well as the forum activities previously described. The building for tomorrow recommendations for long-term preservation arose from consideration of three key questions. First, what is it that we can and should do in order to capture and protect digital design heritage? Second, what curatorial and technical capabilities and capacities are essential for performing those activities? And third, what intellectual property rights do we need to acquire so that those activities comply with legal and policy obligations without compromising legitimate archival and scholarly needs? This led to over 50 recommendations organized into a number of broad categories applicable to the full preservation lifecycle. All is described in the white paper. Here's a quick summary of some of the more significant. To begin with, it is important to recognize the nature of archival design as a process, typically encompassing a large number of exploratory, conceptual and pragmatic iterations. Thus, it is critical to capture design artifacts at a number of significant stages along the way. These include the initial creative brief setting out client directions, the design party, that is the initial creative response to that brief, then the major conceptual design iterations, the construction bid representing the final design and because almost nothing is ever actually realized entirely as designed, the post construction as built state. Contemporary design routinely employs all manner of digital forms. The evolution away from viewing architectural data as static digital blueprints to complex database driven building information models enables many new opportunities. These models are often accompanied by highly dynamic and immersive visualization. The diversity and proprietary nature of these forms complicates subsequent preservation. Thus, while it remains important to capture original native forms, these should be accompanied by a variety of derivatives in standardized formats. While transcoding may incur some loss of detail or function, capturing a heterogeneous set of representations bolsters confidence that the underlying design data will remain viable in some form in future. Because many forms are dependent on specialized software for rendering or manipulation, it is important to have a strategy for preservation of that software. This could take a number of avenues such as permanent low or no cost licensing, the use of third party escrow of non-DRM encumbered software and reliance on emerging technologies for software emulation and preservation, such as Yale's easy emulation as a service infrastructure platform. Lastly, we work with colleagues at the Software Preservation Network and Harvard Law School to augment existing AIA contracts to articulate an explicit intention to submit materials for archival management accompanied by assignment of necessary perpetual non-exclusive rights to acquire, copy, and manipulate as necessary to ensure the ongoing viability and future usability for scholarly purposes. Similar language was developed for applicability to archival donor agreements. We'll now end our presentation with an outline of Project Next Steps. Thanks, Steven. In completing our work on the grant and the white paper, we outlined several next steps for both the Building for Tomorrow team and for the larger community invested in the preservation of digital design data. We have pulled out a few to share with you all today, but for a more comprehensive list of next steps, please reference the white paper. To start, we will continue to share an encouraged discussion around the white paper at events and conferences like this one. We are hoping to hear from as many people as possible in order to continue to expand on the recommendations Steven outlined and that are discussed in more depth in the white paper. We welcome any feedback or suggestions related to these recommendations. Next, we will continue to have conversations with the American Institute of Architects around the draft contract created during this grant work. The proposed draft contract and donor agreement will also be shared with our stakeholder community for feedback. If the AIA decides to incorporate the proposed contract language add an addendum, we will work closely with them on designing educational programming and outreach around the contracts. As a result of our conversations with firms and our work as part of an academic library that supports a design school, we have identified a need and an opportunity to collaborate with faculty on the creation of instructional sessions related to data management for design students. Working with colleagues from other academic institutions, the objectives of these sessions center around providing students with foundational data management skills and introducing them to concepts around the preservation of their own digital files. The community responsible for preserving digital design data continues to grow as cultural heritage institutions, federal institutions, facilities departments, and design firms are having to manage an increasing number of born digital files related to the built environment. The Society of American Archivists Design Records section and their Digital Design Records Task Force has been a space where archivists can work on sharing ideas and developing guidelines to address shared concerns. Toward that end, we are hoping to continue to work with our colleagues on areas that were identified during the November 2020 stakeholder meeting and in subsequent meetings with members of the task force. In particular, we are hoping to work on sharing information with digital preservation software developers to inform future product development and to continue to explore issues related to access. Finally, one of the most meaningful outcomes of this project was having the opportunity to bring together and facilitate conversation between practitioners, historians, digital preservationists, developers, archivists, and librarians. We are hoping to continue to be able to bring this growing community together in meaningful ways to address digital preservation concerns around digital design data and to advocate for standards, strategies, tools, and workflows to help prevent or reduce the loss of vital information in the future. So this concludes our presentation. We thank you so much for watching and hope you will visit the link listed on this slide and read the Building for Tomorrow white paper. Please feel free to reach out to Ann, Steven, or myself if you have any questions or comments or would just like to learn how to get involved. Thank you.