LIPA Webinar on Digitization, to be held on February 6, 2015

LIPA is hosting its first webinar, Digitization Is Possible:  Identifying & Overcoming Barriers, on Friday, February 6, 2015 at 2:00 EST (1:00 CST, 12:00 MST, 11:00 PST).  Led by Valeri Craigle from the University of Utah and Erik Beck from the University of Colorado, the webinar will focus on three topic areas:  collection development; digitization; and digital asset management.

Following a brief introduction, an interactive format will be used to make this training relevant for all. Participants will be polled about their perceptions of the most significant barriers in each topic category.  Results of the poll will steer discussion, leading at the end to a specific tool participants can use to overcome the barriers.  For example, if the audience poll indicates that one barrier to developing a digital collection is not having a metadata standard to work with, the discussion will be directed toward a brief summary of metadata standards and participants will receive an actual metadata standard from the toolkit to take home with them.

There is no charge for the webinar, and it is open to all who are interested (up to a 100 person maximum). RSVP to Margie Maes (mkmaes@gmail.com) no later than Feb. 5, 2015 to receive the connection instructions. The webinar will be hosted on Adobe Connect.  The webinar will be recorded and posted on the LIPA website, along with the toolkit.

#Digitization #webinar

Thankfulness

It is November and this is the time of year to give thanks for the many good things we have and the opportunities for the future.

I am thankful that the Legal Information Preservation Alliance formed about 10 years ago. LIPA is holding firm to its described mission to be devoted to providing leadership, direction, and support for preservation initiatives in law libraries.

LIPA makes a point to: •Listen to members and Lead our libraries in collaborative projects (membership meetings and support for projects like the Chesapeake Project) •Investigate ways to preserve tangible print and digital legal publications into the future (white papers) •Preserve and save legal information in various formats (PALMprint and Internet Archives), and •Ally itself with other organizations with a preservation and legal information interest for programming, research and innovation.

The outreach and collaborative activities of LIPA serves its members and potential library users well. LIPA libraries can work collaboratively on preservation projects at a lower cost and make the most of partnerships created by the organization.

Here are some of the projects that rely on collaboration (also listed in the LIPA brochure): • PALMPrint (Preserving America’s Legal Materials in Print) – a shared, jointly-owned print collection of legal materials, housed in a climate-controlled, purpose-built facility and widely accessible for use as needed. This is a collaborative project with NELLCO, an international consortium of law libraries.

• Web Archiving Service – a subscription service that allows LIPA members to harvest and preserve collections of digital content and create digital archives, using the Archive-It web archiving service from the Internet Archive. LIPA has a consortial subscription to Archive-It, which allows participating LIPA libraries to subscribe at a fraction of the cost of a full license. Long-term plans include collaboration on the curation of topical law-related collections of archived web content.

• Law Review Preservation Program – a long-term archiving solution for law reviews published online. In partnership with Berkeley Electronic Press, law reviews published on bepress’s Digital Commons platform can be automatically archived in CLOCKSS, an international dark archive for long-term preservation.

• Legal Information Archive – a collaborative digital archive established to preserve and ensure permanent access to vital born digital legal information, using OCLC’s CONTENTdm® and its Digital Archive™ system. The Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group is the biggest contributor to the Legal Information Archive. LIPA has negotiated consortial discounts and waivers of some fees for its members who wish to use this OCLC service.

• LlPA is a member of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, a collaborative effort of the Library of Congress to preserve a distributed national digital collection for the benefit of present and future generations.

• LIPA is a supporting partner of Perma.cc, an online preservation service developed by the Harvard Law School Library in conjunction with academic law libraries across the country and other organizations.

These collaborations provide LIPA members with lots of possibilities. I appreciate being part of an organization that is active, informed and makes these opportunities available.

Wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving!

Questions and Answers for Digital Preservation

The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Program Manager and Partner Specialist at Internet Archive and co-chair of the Innovation Working Group of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance.

At July’s Digital Preservation 2014 conference, hosted by the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., a team from the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Innovation Working Group held a session to formally launch the Digital Preservation Questions and Answers online forum. As the NDSA starts to engage with other associations to help spread the word about this resource, and having recently presented at the LIPA business meeting at AALL, we were glad when Margie invited us to write up a blog post for the LIPA site describing the Q&A project and website. LIPA is an active NDSA member and strong proponent of digital preservation and this is the perfect place to begin reaching out to NDSA members and affiliated organizations to promote this project and encourage use and participation. In this post, I’ll give a quick “who, what, when, where, and how” about the Digital Preservation Q&A site. For background on how the project originally came about, see this prior blog post: http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2014/07/digital-preservation-questions-meet-digital-preservation-answers/

What is the Digital Preservation Q&A site?

The Q&A site aims to provide a single, user-friendly forum for exchanging information, professional practices, and individual and institutional knowledge around all matters related to digital preservation. As a field that evolves alongside technological and social change, digital preservation is especially reliant upon professionals sharing their wisdom and practices with others; however, this information is often exchanged on listservs, Google Groups, social media, and other informal networks and channels that can be hard to find, search, or share, or preserve. The Digital Preservation Q&A forum was created to be a unified, public, searchable, place to share this information on a platform that is hosted and administered by groups dedicated to supporting digital preservation practice, education, and knowledge sharing.

Who participates in the site?

The forum currently is being used by a wide diversity of those interested in digital preservation. Credentials are not needed to participate! Already the site reflects a range of institution types, levels of expertise, and topical areas. As the site’s about page states, the forum is generally intended for “information technologists, archivists, engineers, librarians, computer scientists, curators, web developers and others to help each other make best use of tools, techniques, processes, workflows, practices and approaches to insuring long term access to digital information.”

What sort of Q&As are relevant?

Questions and answers can range from general advice seeking to highly technical recommendations — the site intends to be an open forum, friendly to the information-seeking and advice-giving general public as well as the experienced practitioner. Questions have covered topics as diverse as policy development, cost models and hardware prices, migration and emulation, file formats, web archiving, and digital forensics.  While the site does aim to mediate questions that strongly associate digitization with digital preservation, it is open to all question and answers that involve digital preservation. Questions about questions are welcome too and can be found via the “meta” tag. In the planning stages, the forum’s creators explicitly decided to take a free-wheeling, figure-it-out-as-we-go approach towards allowing questions, so interested users are encouraged not to feel daunted in asking their digital preservation questions. All questions and answers are welcomed!

Who administers the sites?

The site was started by a collaboration between the NDSA, the Open Planets Foundation (OPF), and interested practitioners. It is jointly managed by NDSA & OPF and hosted on servers maintained by the OPF. To mitigate against potential spam, creating a user account is required, but remember that the site is hosted on the infrastructure of OPF, an organization “established to provide practical solutions and expertise in digital preservation.” The site will not be bound to the whims of corporate profit-seeking.

How you can help

Asking and answering questions, or even commenting on specific questions and answers, is an obvious, easy way to contribute to helping build the site. But you can also contribute just by using the site as an informational resource. The “voting” feature allows to you recognize question and answers you find particularly informative or insightful. Though the forum is new and the vote counts currently appear to be low, as the pool of information grows, and use of the forum expands, the value of user voting will become more and more apparent as it helps filter the most relevant questions and answers to the top. Be sure to bookmark and visit the Digital Preservation Questions and Answers site and start helping to build this vital digital preservation community resource!

#OpenPlanetsFoundation #preservationeducation #meta #DigitalPreservation #nationaldigitalstewardshipalliance