Continuing the review of 2024, the following summaries the activities of the NDSA Interest and Working Groups activities. Please have a look at NDSA’s accomplishments – and feel free to reach out to NDSA with any questions on how you can get involved!

Interest Groups

Content Interest Group

For the year, the Content Interest Group met quarterly on the first Thursday of the month at 12:00pm EST.  We identified topics of interest through an ongoing but now defunct jamboard! We held 4 meetings utilizing various formats to facilitate the exchange of information.  In February we held a Content Exchange about how your organization manages the access levels of digital content in your reading rooms, physical and virtual.  Due to the success of the first Content Exchange, we held another one in May on how your organizations are increasing representation or including under-represented groups in your collections.  In August, we switched it up with presentations by metadata experts and discussion on understanding metadata standards and ways to incorporate them in our work.  Julie Shi, Digital Preservation Librarian, Scholars Portal, University of Toronto Libraries, discussed METS.  Leslie Johnston, Director of Digital Preservation, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration discussed PREMIS.  We winded the year down with our final meeting in November with a discussion using content to show impact of preservation or the risk of loss. 

Infrastructure Interest Group

For the Infrastructure Interest Group, 2024 began with a discussion led by the founders of the AEOLIAN Network, a project whose focus was “to investigate the role that AI can play to make born-digital and digitised cultural records more accessible to users.” Its outcomes included multiple workshops, case studies and journal publications, all of which focused on the larger community’s use of AI in this space. During its next two quarterly meetings, group members presented on their unique requirements and solutions surrounding content staging areas and repository ingest workflows. We listened to in-depth descriptions of workflows from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, the University Libraries at Ohio State University and finally the UW Digital Collections Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Our final meeting of the year introduced the Internet Archive’s Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record as a reading selection, from which several thought-provoking essays were brought forward for discussion by group members.

Standards & Practices Interest Group

The Standards & Practices Interest Group met quarterly on the first Monday of the month at 1:00 p.m. Eastern. Our topics for this year included: Digital preservation system migration; The language of the cloud; Selection for preservation; and Persistent identifiers and preservation. Michael Dulock presented his experience with migrating preservation systems at UC-Boulder for our January meeting. Our subsequent meetings were member-driven discussions. By far the most engaging and well-attended discussion was our exploration of “the language of the cloud” at our April 1, 2024 meeting. We shared experiences with outsourcing infrastructure to major cloud-based vendors (AWS, Azure, etc), and how that has impacted our preservation practices. Out of this discussion, we formed a sub-group to develop a survey on cloud-based infrastructure practices across the membership, which included members of the Infrastructure Interest Group. With the release of the NDSA Storage Survey, we will resume work on the Cloud Services sub-group in 2025, with a follow-up discussion scheduled for our first meeting S&P IG on January 13, 2025.

Working Groups

Communication and Publications Working Group

The Communications and Publications Working Group (CAPs) worked with the Coordinating Committee and chairs of Interest and Working Groups to update internal documentation and website content and publish blog posts and reports.  CAPs works with survey Working Groups to edit and publish the reports, sometimes working on statistical analysis quality assurance. This year CAPs developed additional guidelines around accessibility for report preparation.

Climate Watch Working Group

The Climate Watch Working Group had a productive year establishing our workflows, clarifying our publication criteria and objectives, and setting up our publication platform. We hope to release our inaugural publication early in 2025, so keep an eye out for announcements! 

Events Strategy Working Group

Beginning in Spring 2024, the Events Strategy Working Group (ESWG) focused on a framework for operationalizing recommendations from a previous planning group. They held monthly meetings, with breakout discussions that focused on working groups working on plans for a National Conference and Designated Communities. Despite some uncertainties about NDSA’s organizational affiliation, ESWG plans to deliver three key items by April 2025: (1) a charge for a standing Events Steering Committee to manage NDSA’s overall events strategy and serve as a liaison to annual conference committees; (2) an annual meeting toolkit with recommendations for both in-person and online events (with in-person events to resume in 2027 and coincide with NDSA Excellence Awards), and an action plan to encourage local and regional communities of practice with affiliated organizations and institutions. This action plan will define a process for developing an experts list and a speaker’s bureau to support digital preservation activities and workshops as well as a mechanism for endorsing digital preservation panels at affiliated events.

Excellence Awards

In 2024, the Excellence Awards Working Group utilized the year without an awards cycle to promote EAWG through blogs and video clips. Blogs were published via SAA’s bloggERS and the NDSA blog. Video clips were uploaded to the NDSA YouTube channel, and an Excellence Awards playlist was created to group them. Further blogs and clips are scheduled into 2025.

In addition, EAWG co-chairs drafted an Overview and Guidelines for the EAWG, which has been reviewed by the Communications and Publications Working Group. The EAWG projects finalizing this document in 2025. Finally, Jessica Venlet accepted the position of EAWG Co-chair for 2025-2027.

Levels of Digital Preservation

This year a new Levels Revision Working Group was formed with a remit to carry out a focused review of the Levels looking specifically at the environmental impact of the Levels. Look out for further news on this work in 2025.

This year we have run four Open Sessions: in January we held a general Q&A on the Levels, in April we focused on the Curation Guide, in July the topic was the Assessment Tool and October’s session provided a general introduction to the Levels aimed at those who hadn’t used them before. The Levels Steering Group also gave a presentation on Levels at the Virtual DigiPres conference.

We have seen a few changes on the Levels Steering Group, welcoming new members Rebecca Fraimow, Elizabeth La Beaud and Keith Pendergrass. Karen Cariani left the Steering Group to focus on other priorities and we thank her for all her hard work.

Membership Working Group

The Membership Working Group worked on a new process for onboarding new members to NDSA, and produced a comprehensive report with six detailed proposals designed to increase engagement of members. One of these proposals focused on having a standing Membership Working Group, who would provide onboarding and ongoing membership support. This group will launch in January 2025.

Storage Survey

The working group published the 2023 storage infrastructure report in October, along with anonymized survey results, the survey codebook, and a crosswalk between the 2019 and 2023 survey questions. Working group members presented the survey results at iPRES, DLF, and SAA’s Research Forum.

The post NDSA Interest and Working Groups 2024 Year in Review appeared first on DLF.