One of the foundational resources we are creating as part of the Digital Readiness Community of Practice project is a road map for embarking on digital collections development work. Based on the NDSA’s Levels of Digital Preservation, our Digital Readiness Levels offer a structure for organizations to plan and sustainably grow their digital initiatives in order to improve access to collections. At its core, it’s a quick, easy-to-use matrix for visualizing where an organization might be within the “digital work spectrum” and what steps they might take to evolve in seven key focus areas including project planning, copyright and permissions, digitization, describing, sharing and storing content, and evaluation. The Levels also provide a framework for organizations to prioritize continuing education and staff training activities related to digital work.
Throughout the month of November, we shared a draft of the Digital Readiness Levels and requested feedback from 60 colleagues and professionals engaged in digital work. With a 55% response rate (yowza!), we received A TON OF helpful feedback on both the Digital Readiness Levels’ structure and content. A few themes emerged:
- “We love this idea!”: Folks were excited to learn about this “very useful” and “much-needed” resource. They shared that smaller local history organizations often feel left behind and worry about “catching up” when it comes to digital work — having an inclusive and easy-to-use tool for those organizations is important.
- More accessible language: We heard from most reviewers that keeping the language and terminology as easy to understand as possible should be a priority. Minimizing use of “industry jargon” or acronyms related to digital work will render the Digital Readiness Levels more useful to a wide range of practitioners.
Spoiler alert! We’ll be creating and sharing a “digital readiness glossary” in the coming months to help demystify language used in this work. - Progressing through the Levels: It should be clear to practitioners that an organization can be at different readiness positions within the Digital Readiness Levels depending on their digital projects, organizational priorities and other factors. And, it’s perfectly appropriate to move within the Levels for different focus areas as projects and priorities change. It’s not always a linear path and that’s fine!
- Additional guidance: Finally, reviewers suggested (and we whole-heartedly agree!) that a complementary implementation guide will help practitioners use the Digital Readiness Levels, especially one that includes useful tips, real-world examples, workflows, templates, best practices and instructions.
We’ve been hard at work revising the Digital Readiness Levels. Our esteemed Digital Readiness Launch Committee reviewed this feedback and offered additional suggestions from their own experiences to further refine the Levels. No matter where an organization might land on the “digital projects continuum” — from newbie to experienced practitioner, the Digital Readiness Levels will help anyone embarking on a digitization project feel more confident and competent in this work.
What’s next? We’re looking forward to sharing the Digital Readiness Levels in the coming weeks! Many thanks to this true “community of practice” who shared their time, expertise and resources to help improve this core component of our project.
Are you interested in learning more about digital readiness and connecting with other local history practitioners engaged in digital work? Join our listserv! Visit digistew and click “Ask to join group” at the top of the page to be added to this listserv. Visit Digital Readiness Community of Practice for more information about this project.
by Kristen Whitson, Digital Readiness Program Assistant
Building a Community of Practice for Digital Readiness in Wisconsin is supported by an Archives Collaboratives Implementation Grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the granting arm of the National Archives. Read the full implementation grant narrative submitted to NHPRC.
