Sustainable Community-Owned Partnerships in Digital Preservation: DPSC Planning Project Final Report
Jessica Meyerson Jackson Huang Ryan Menefee Courtney Mumma Lydia Tang Alicia Wise Nathan Tallman Sibyl Schaefer
<p>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.</p>
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<p>In the context of these challenges, the Educopia&nbsp;Institute&mdash;in partnership with APTrust, Chronopolis, CLOCKSS, lyrasis, the MetaArchive Cooperative, and the Texas Digital Library (six members of the Digital Preservation Services Collaborative)&mdash;sought funding from the Institute of Library and Museum Services (IMLS) to reaffirm the need for&mdash;and to establish a shared vision for&mdash;the sustained viability of values-driven, community-supported approaches to distributed digital preservation (DDP).</p>
<p>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: <strong>"advocacy-as-a-service,"</strong> best deployed at the institutional preservation strategy-forming moment; and <strong>"readiness-as-a-service,"</strong> 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.</p>
<p>Beyond individual organizations, readiness-as- a-service is also a call for collective strategy among values-driven, community-supported bit- level6 service providers to anticipate and be prepared to respond to change (and to shocks) in a nimble, coordinated, collaborative way.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Please visit the <strong><a href="https://educopia.org/research-project/dpsc-planning-project-sustainable-community-owned-partnerships-in-digital-preservation/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">project page</a></strong> for additional details and resources.</p>
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