On May 22, Curating Community Digital Collections (CCDC) participants convened at the Lowell Center in Madison, Wisconsin for an intensive training experience – an immersion workshop focused on digital preservation. The event also functioned as the official launch of CCDC’s year one summer projects.
Over three days, the workshop offered a range of presentations and hands-on training opportunities, introducing participants to workflows, best practices and tools to facilitate digital preservation planning and tasks. Two dozen students, host site supervisors and mentors assembled as six CCDC project teams, to become better acquainted and further hone their digital preservation project plans for this summer.
CCDC staff Emily Pfotenhauer and Vicki Tobias introduced teams to basic digital preservation concepts and policy development work. AVP senior consultant and digital stewardship expert Amy Rudersdorf led multiple presentations and training sessions on AVP-developed tools including Fixity and Exactly. UW-Madison iSchool instructor Dorothea Salo presented on the importance of file integrity and various digital file storage options. UW Digital Collections Center digital services librarian and CCDC mentor Jesse Henderson shared best practices, tools and techniques for digital imaging work. Henderson also led a tour of the UW Digital Collections digitization facilities, showing various digitization equipment and workflows in practice.
Participants also enjoyed lunchtime talks by Emily Pfotenhauer as well as CCDC mentors UW-Stout archivist Heather Stecklein, UW-Milwaukee librarian Kristin Briney and Beloit College archivist Stacey Erdman. Pfotenhauer introduced content management systems. Stecklein and Briney shared results of their work with the UW Libraries Digital Preservation Task Force. Erdman offered an overview of the Digital POWRR program, for which she serves as a coordinator and instructor.
UW-Madison Archives media archivist Cat Phan and Wisconsin Historical Society digital collections coordinator Paul Hedges joined participants on day three for informal chats focused on policy-making and best practices and challenges related to audio and video preservation. Deb Shapiro of the iSchool at UW-Madison and Shaun Hayes from the School of Information Studies at UW-Milwaukee were on hand during the first day to field graduate program-specific questions.
CCDC teams left Madison armed with new ideas and tools and a stronger understanding of digital stewardship work. Students will visit their host sites and start work on their respective digital preservation projects beginning in early June. Check back throughout the summer for updates from each host site and CCDC staff.
