On Wednesday, March 3, I’ll be at History San Jose to give a workshop on the basics of digital preservation. This workshop is being given as part of the California Association of Museums conference and is the public test-run for a new digital preservation curriculum that the California Preservation Program is developing.
For workshop attendees, here’s the handout (2.6 MB, PDF)
The goals of this workshop are to provide people with enough information to get started with digital projects and make good course corrections as they do so. By way of further provenance, I suspect that this has its genesis in some off-the-cuff remarks I made at the IMLS “Call to Action” forum in Buffalo, part of their Connecting to Collections project.
The uncontroversial assumptions at work in this workshop are that digital preservation consists largely of the creation of some digital content that is preservable, putting that content is in a reliable systems environment, and paying attention to emerging needs and problems. The subtext is that the digital side of our operations are mature enough that we should lower the barriers to entry and the criteria for successful digital preservation efforts.
This workshop tries to avoid the inertia that comes from pondering problems that won’t manifest themselves in the immediate future or with the implications that every institutions need to have a deep engagement with expert digital preservation efforts. By quarantining those disincentives and providing some good foundational guidance, I hope this series helps to give smaller institutions what they need to get started and be confident that their efforts will prove sustainable.