DPN + AVP Collaboration wins 2017 NDSA Innovation Award

We received some wonderful news today: it was announced at the opening plenary of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Digital Preservation conference in Pittsburgh, PA that the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) received the 2017 NDSA Innovation Award in the organization category, in particular for the Digital Preservation Workflow Curriculum that we collaborated on with them! The Innovation Awards were established by the NDSA “to recognize and encourage innovation in the field of digital preservation stewardship. These awards highlight and commend creative individuals, projects, organizations, and future stewards demonstrating originality and excellence in their contributions to the field of digital preservation.” We are truly honored and humbled by this recognition!

In response to DPN members’ concerns around the issues of workflow for digital preservation, DPN engaged AVP to develop a digital preservation workflow curriculum to share with DPN members and others in the digital preservation community. The curriculum was published under a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) license in July 2017.

Aimed at helping organizations develop and enact programmatic digital preservation, the curriculum goes beyond the basics to help participants overcome obstacles to operationalizing digital preservation at their institutions. Based on analysis of existing trainings and interviews with diverse stakeholders, the curriculum focuses on organizational capacity development over individual professional development and is structured to include two representatives per institution. Emphasizing program development, management, and governance in 6 modular sessions, topics track the digital preservation lifecycle from selection of priority assets, to submission to a preservation environment, to sustainability.

The published curriculum is packaged for easy implementation, and includes learning objectives, guidance on participant levels and demographics, resources required, and recommended background reading. Each module comes with a set of slides and exercises that can be easily modified for the workshop context. Get it on our website or on the DPN website under best practices.