Hello Content WG Members,
As you probably have heard, the NDSA leadership group is working on the next edition of the National Agenda for Digital Stewardship.  The Content WG contributes to the report by bringing up important, at-risk content that should be part of our national focus for preservation in the coming year/s.  We need to:

1)Suggest any new content areas we think need to be added:  Two areas suggested at this time are digital art and software.  Trevor Owens at LC has suggested text for software that I include below for your review.  We hope that some of you involved in preservation of digital art will help us draft text for this section.  Please contact Abbie and/or me if you can help with this, or even better, post suggested text to the list.  Maybe Ben at ArtBase or other WG members who work with digital art can help with this.  Also, are there other content types you would like included?

2)Expand on, or dive deeper into, one or more of the content types included in last year's report:  We covered electronic records, moving image and recorded sound, web and social media, and research data.  We need your suggestions for these content types and would greatly appreciate some draft text that dives more deeply into the specific problems of one of these content types.

We hope you can spend a few minutes and contribute to this development for the National Agenda.  Contributions by the end of March would be greatly appreciated.

Trevor's text for software preservation is a good example of what we need.
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Software Preservation
Software is simultaneously a baseline infrastructure and a mode of creative expression. It is both the key to accessing and making sense of digital objects and an increasingly important historical artifact in its own right. When historians write the social, political, economic and cultural history of the 21st century they will need to consult the software of the times. As such, it is essential that the digital stewardship continue to make strides to ensure long term access to software.

Much of the ground work for preservation in this area was laid in the preserving virtual worlds NDIIPP funded initiative. With that noted, this has moved from an area of research interest into a place in which considerable, progress has been made but which is ripe for considerable collection and infrastructure development. The work of the National Software Reference Library and its partnership with Stanford University to preserve The Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing illustrates how partnerships can help to get disk image copies of historical software.  With that noted, as Matthew Kirschenbaum notes in An Executable Past: The Case for a National Software Registry there are also critical reasons for the collection of source code as well. Beyond this, connected to the development of emulation platforms (like JSMESS and Olive Library), we are rapidly approaching a world in which it will be possible to make historical software collections replay-able over the web.


1.      http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2013/02/video-game-preservation-at-scale-an-interview-with-henry-lowood/

2.      http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/multimedia/documents/PreservingEXE_report_final101813.pdf
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Your contributions would be greatly appreciated!

Abbie and Cathy
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Cathy N. Hartman
Associate Dean of Libraries
University of North Texas
940-565-3269
[cid:FD6C374C-4409-4836-B183-D6528A790B79]


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