“Shared Services” for Values-driven, Community-supported Digital Preservation
Alicia Wise Courtney Mumma Jessica Meyerson Lydia Tang Nathan Tallman Ryan Menefee Sibyl Schaefer
Community-supported, values-driven digital preservation services operate in a landscape where the increasing economic, labor, and climate challenges are too big for any one organization to tackle alone. 

In the context of these challenges, the Educopia Institute—in partnership with APTrust, Chronopolis, CLOCKSS, lyrasis, MetaArchive, and the Texas Digital Library (six members of the Digital Preservation Services Collaborative)—sought funding from the Institute of Library and Museum Services (IMLS) to reaffirm the need for—and to establish a shared vision for—the sustained viability of values-driven, community-supported approaches to distributed digital preservation (DDP). 

As the project advanced we were reminded that, as technical service providers, we too are embedded in a broader cultural context that is unconsciously biased towards technocentric solutions, or solutions that foreground technological infrastructures and background social infrastructures. Acknowledging that there are technical and non-technical requirements across the information management continuum, our shared service model vision aims to offer two additional services at discrete moments in the institutional decision-making process: “advocacy-as-a-service,” best deployed at the institutional preservation strategy-forming moment; and “readiness-as-a-service,” assisting stewardship organizations that have recently formed their preservation strategy to identify the content, preservation needs, budget realities, etc., as they begin to research the digital preservation services landscape.

Beyond individual organizations, readiness-as-a-service is also a call for collective strategy among values-driven, community-supported bit-level service providers to anticipate and be prepared to respond to change (and to shocks) in a nimble, coordinated, collaborative way.

We think this vision offers an exciting and viable path forward for values-driven, community-supported service providers, and we hope this vision will attract additional service providers and grow our coalition of support.
approaches to preservation scaling up