The Insights Interviews: First Person Perspectives on Ensuring Long Term Access to Our Digital Heritage

Back when I was working for the Library of Congress I did, and helped coordinate, a ton of interviews with practitioners and thinkers working in digital preservation for the National Digital Stewardship Alliances innovation working group. At one point, there was discussion of making a book out of the then 33 interviews. As with many ideas, it stalled out at some point. In any event, I worked up an intro for that and a table of contents at one point. So I figured I would just post that here, as I think it makes the interviews a bit easier to navigate. Together they form a whole that is, I think, more useful than just looking at them as part of a serial publication. For context, I wrote the intro below in 2014 and the interviews range from 2011-2014.From the initial draft I also added a set of 9 additional fantastic interviews that Julia Fernandez did as a Junior Fellow focused on understanding, documenting and preserving digital culture. I also added in links to guest posts that Sharon Leon and Mackenzie Smith wrote about approaches to developing open source software that are slightly different in that they predate the focus on interviews as an approach.

I don’t claim the credit for this massive amount of work. A ton of people did a lot of work on running, planning and coordinating these. Off the top of my head Jane Mandelbaum, Martha Anderson, Abbey Potter, Erin Engle, Butch Lazorchak, Jefferson Bailey, Lori Emerson, Julia Fernandez, Ricky Padilla, Barbra Taranto, come to mind as people who either did significant work in running or coordinating interviews. I know there are many others from the NDSA innovation working group who contributed to doing these as well.

The Insights Interviews:First Person Perspectives on Ensuring Long Term Access to Our Digital Heritage

Innovation can be a terrible buzzword. It can be a stand in for flavors of the month, and trendy ideas on the upswing of this year’s hype scale. With that said, it remains a critical concept. Particularly in a field like digital preservation where the idea of even keeping up with the scale and deluge of digital media along with an ever changing series of new forms, formats, tools and platforms is often dizzying and overwhelming. In some of my first conversations with Jane Mandelbaum, the Library of Congress co-chair for the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation working group we struck on the idea of focusing on how exactly people are making it work.

Across a range of disciplines and areas an amazing set of professionals have emerged to ensure long term access to digital information and were doing amazing things with that information. When we did our first interviews for the then new Signal digital preservation blog I had no idea how useful and valuable many of them would become as touchstones for our field. Some of these interviews were topical and primarily of interest in the moment, but many of them share important and profound insights (the term the then Director of NDIIPP Martha Anderson suggested for the series). When an NDIIPP colleague approached me about helping to shape a volume out of the best of these interviews I thought it was a great idea. In reflecting on them, I think there are four particular cross cutting reasons that these interviews organized as they are here, are particularly useful for emerging and established professionals in and around the work of digital stewardship.

First Person Perspectives from an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field

Everyone in this volume has launched or established a career in this new and interdisciplinary field of work. As digital technologies reshape work across every sector ensuring long term access to information now touches on nearly every sector. Our education and training systems are responding to these changes, but beyond that, it is invaluable to use these interviews as a point of entry into the work of individuals in this field. In this respect, every interview here is an opportunity to understand someone’s career trajectory and in many cases a chance to gain insight into the skills and knowledge required to take on the hybrid roles that many of these innovative individuals are engaged in. In this respect, the collection is of particular interest to young professionals and students looking to establish the course for their careers.

Practical Dispatches from the Front Lines of Digital Stewardship

A considerable amount of ink and pixels have been spilt over theory of digital stewardship. Models, frameworks and certification criteria abound. These are great resources, but given the rapid pace at which technologies and systems are evolving, understanding how individuals are working to ensure long term access to digital information provides insight into how people on the ground are actually making this work happen. In this respect, each interview in this volume is an illustration of how theory comes into practice. Each interview provides a firsthand frontline narrative of how the models and frameworks of the field are calibrated into the messy realities of resource constraints and practical limitations of the world.

A Cross Section of Work and Issues Involved in Digital Stewardship

Big picture strategy, perspectives of content specialists, exploration of issues in the design and maintenance of infrastructure and systems, needs and desires of researchers scholars and other end users. While the interviews were not done to create a comprehensive picture of the field, as they have accrued over time when we set about sorting out the best of them into different buckets I was thrilled to see how well they covered the waterfront of collecting, organizing, preserving and providing access to digital information.

Disaggregating Digital Stewardship and Preservation

It’s not as tidy as it would be if this all hung together from a single perspective, there is a lot of messiness in the different objectives, frameworks and perspectives which different participants come from. That is something which I think is a particular strength of the volume. The rhetoric of the digital often makes it seem like we should be moving into the clean lines and clear cut universe of a science of digital stewardship. But when we zoom in to the work at each layer of the infrastructure for digital stewardship we are building it becomes evident that the same professional values and approaches that made for idiosyncratic visions of preservation and access in the past are just as present in our digital future as they were in our analog past. Digital stewards engage in their work toward differing objectives through differing means. For instance, considerations about the authenticity of digital artworks are not the same as concerns about the authenticity of electronic records.

Chapter One: Digital Strategy