As of 17 September 2021, the NDSA Leadership unanimously voted to welcome its eight most recent applicants into the membership. Each new member brings a host of skills and experience to our group. Keep an eye out for them on your calls and be sure to give them a shout out. Please join me in welcoming our new members.

Botanical Research Institute of Texas

The Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BIRT) was founded with an institutional commitment to the preservation and dissemination of botanical knowledge. BRIT’s core collection is the Herbarium which holds almost 1.5 million preserved plant specimens. Approximately 70% of this collection has been digitally imaged and is continually growing through ongoing digitization efforts. These specimen images and data are disseminated through data portals such as TORCH and SERNEC and preserved through partnerships with the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas and CyVerse.

Oklahoma State University Library

The Oklahoma State University Library has been dedicated to digital preservation for over two decades, beginning with efforts to preserve and make accessible online Charles Kappler’s Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Digital preservation efforts were first enacted by the Library’s Electronic Publishing Center (EPC, 2000-2008), but larger initiatives were soon in place throughout the Library. Another major contributor in the digital preservation area has been the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program, which was founded in 2007 and has been fully digital since its inception.

NYC Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS)

The New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) manages formats dating 1640-2020 and 500 TB of both digitized and born digital material. A team of 8 permanent staff are dedicated to digitizing collections at a growth rate of 150TB per year. DORIS is preparing to ingest ~200 TB of born digital government material with the mayoral changeover in January 2022. Since 2017, DORIS has used BitCurator for reviewing and ingesting born-digital content from city agencies. 

Amistad Research Center

The Amistad Research Center (ARC) has been digitizing archives and manuscripts, photographs and text for online access and digital exhibitions for a number of years. In partnership with Adam Matthews Digital and other library vendors, one record collection has been digitized with interest in digitizing other collections housed here. Additionally, ARC established over the last decade a robust audiovisual reformatting program with the ability to digitize most audio and some video formats in house, while outsourcing film collections or U-matic videotapes as funding is acquired. ARC is now exploring long-term cloud storage solutions for our high quality access and digital master files, as well as the funding required to maintain such storage.

University of Dubuque Charles C. Myers Library 

The Charles C. Myers Library manages its preservation environment using open-source, on-site, and off-site, and cloud technologies. The library curates digital exhibitions featuring  minority populations in the aviation field and underrepresented groups on campus over the last 100 years at the university.

University of Arkansas at Fayetteville Libraries

At the University of Arkansas Fayetteville Libraries there are two units that participate in various levels of digital preservation. The Digital Services Department provides various stage levels of digital preservation depending on the collection scope and grant agreements for digitization.  Special Collections, which also houses the University Archives, performs a detailed digital preservation process.

The African American Research Library and Cultural Center 

The Broward County African American Research Library and Cultural Center (AARLCC) is a public research library. Their digitization and digital preservation efforts hope to create access and awareness of content in their collection which focuses on Black history and life. AARLCC is also using 3D scanning for artifacts. As a Black collecting library and archive, another area of interest is the work of web archiving for Black collecting institutions. AARLCC has co-created the Archiving the Black Web initiative to support efforts of similar Black collecting organizations and to begin to document and preserve content on the web related to Black history and life.

Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Canada 

The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph is a consolidated archive committed to following best practices in ensuring both born-digital records received through transfer or donation and analogue records which have been digitized for preservation or outreach purposes, are preserved long-term. The Congregation has built an in-house digital preservation system using free and open source software, following the OAIS model and strives to achieve the highest NDSA levels of preservation over time.

~Nathan Tallman, NDSA Vice Chair

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