2022-2024
DPSC Planning Project: Sustainable Community-Owned Partnerships in Digital Preservation
Educopia Institute partnered with six members of the Digital Preservation Services Collaborative (APTrust, Chronopolis, CLOCKSS, LYRASIS, MetaArchive, and Texas Digital Library) to articulate the need for values-driven, community-supported distributed digital preservation service options and to propose a service model for collaboration that ensures the authority, sustainability, and viability of these options. This service model was to delineate where partners could combine service efforts and/or remain independent for the sake of a variety of organizational and content needs, distributed digital preservation good practice, efficiency, and sustainability at the field level.
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.
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services LG-252340-OLS-22.
Recruitment
- August 2022: Announcing the DPSC Planning Project
- September 2022: Request for Proposals: Community Engagement & Service Modeling Project Consultant (closed)
- October 2022: The DPSC Planning Project is Recruiting Stakeholders
Requirements Gathering
- March 2023: End User Interview Protocol
- April 2023: DPSC Planning Project End User Survey
- May 2023: DPSC Planning Project End User Survey Responses
- June 2023: Requirements Inputs Gathering Executive Summary
Service Modeling
- May 2024: Sustainable Community-Owned Partnerships in Digital Preservation: DPSC Planning Project Final Report
- June 2024: Webinar Announcement: Sustainable Community-Owned Partnerships in Digital Preservation (Eventbrite)
Webinar:
June 2024: Webinar + Panel Discussion on Sustainable Community-Owned Partnerships in Digital Preservation