We’re pleased to announce an exciting addition to the program for Digital Preservation 2016, co-sponsored by National Digital Stewardship Alliance and DLF, which will be held immediately following this year’s DLF Forum.

Allison Druin photo
Allison Druin

Dr. Allison Druin joins keynoter Bergis Jules as our closing plenary speaker for the conference. Druin’s talk will take up the conference theme, “building communities of practice,” in the context of “communities of innovation” and her work with America’s National Park Service–presently celebrating its 100th anniversary.

Druin is on two-year leave from her faculty appointment at the University of Maryland’s iSchool while serving as Special Advisor for National Digital Strategy at the National Park Service. Her focus there is on how to better leverage digital tools to excite the next generation of park visitors, to change how the national parks share their stories, and to better preserve our cultural and natural resources.

Druin received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design, her master’s degree from the MIT Media Lab, and her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico’s College of Education. In her previous work as the University of Maryland’s first Chief of Futurist and Co-Director of the Future of Information Alliance (FIA), Druin helped establish a FIA partner network with the National Park Service, Newseum, the Smithsonian, National Geographic and other organizations to explore the opportunities and challenges of the rapidly changing information landscapes. At the University of Maryland, she has served as Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, Associate Dean of Research for the iSchool, and an ADVANCE Professor for STEM Women Initiatives. Druin’s personal research has focused on developing new educational technologies for children. Druin has pioneered the development of new co-design methods that bring product-users into the technology design process. Her team of faculty, staff, and graduate students, recently engaged elementary school kids to help design digital elements of the Every Kid in a Park program; an initiative by the White House and Department of the Interior to give all fourth graders and their families free entrance to national parks. She is currently working with NPS leadership to use co-design methods to reimagine the visitor experience for the Lincoln Memorial.

An abstract for her Digital Preservation 2016 plenary talk follows:

BUILDING COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE FOR A CULTURE OF INNOVATION

The speed of change in the digital world makes it difficult to point to just one tool, technology, or “digital infrastructure” that can support all the education, conservation, and historic preservation priorities of the National Park Service. It is that combination of data (content), software (interactivity), and device (context) that can address the priorities of NPS for the next century. It is important to remember that digital infrastructure can change more quickly than physical infrastructure. The power of digital is that it is so malleable for change, but this is also the challenge. The speed of change and the scale of impact, is unprecedented. Digital innovation makes use of a variety of new tools that can address future challenges with novel solutions. Yet, innovation can be disruptive, transformative, and can still be an achievement that leads to new shared infrastructure. Given this landscape of change and opportunity, we have to ask, how do we create communities of practice that can become true communities of innovation? How can we support workforce development, and build leadership pipelines for the digital work we must undertake? The opportunities are there, but the challenges are many when considering constrained resources, silo-ed structures of leadership, and federal regulations. I will talk about these opportunities and challenges for the next century of service.

Learn more about all of our keynote and plenary speakers for the DLF Forum, DLF Liberal Arts Colleges Pre-Conference, and Digital Preservation 2016 here.

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