September 27, 2019

Sustaining Digital Curation and Preservation Training in the U.S.: Compiled Project Reports

This report serves as a compilation of two reports produced in a one-year project, “Sustaining Digital Curation and Preservation Training,” which was conducted from July 2018 to June 2019, through the generous funding of the Institute for Museum and Library Services. In this compilation, we document a critical problem area we have been researching – namely, how to provide sustainable pathways for longer-term hosting of digital curation and preservation training materials and programming for library and archives professionals.

In this relatively brief project, we laid a strong foundation for future work. We focused our efforts on increasing relationships and partnerships between trainers, hosts, and funders of continuing education offerings, and on learning from each others’ experiences and observations. The net result of our work is summarized within this compilation, but it also actively lives on in our collaborative network of core project partners.

This report compilation opens with a brief introduction to the challenges in building, disseminating, and maintaining digital curation and preservation training content and programs. It then provides an overview of the project’s scope and methods, including the facilitation methodology that guided our two in-person project meetings, in which much of our discovery work took place. Finally, we provide synthesized documentation of our findings, including 1) experiences in trying to maintain training content and educational experiences over time, and 2) a set of options and pipelines towards sustainability that we believe that both we and other creators and hosts of projects that produce educational resources should consider.