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Dear NDSA Community,
As Summer begins, we are writing to provide an update on events and activities, and to call for your participation in NDSA leadership.
New Members and Activities
During the Spring, the NDSA community launched the Third Annual Web Archiving Survey, the 2016 Digital Preservation Innovation Awards, and are busy preparing for the 2016 Digital Preservation conference, in Milwaukee.
This Spring was also a time for membership renewals -- we contacted all organizational members, the vast majority renewed their commitments to NDSA. And NDSA has welcomed six new organizational members in the last four months, making a total of eleven new organizational this year (view the full member list).
Elections
This Summer we turn our attention to renewing our leadership. We gratefully thank outgoing working group chairs and coordination committee members for extending their service across the transition period. And we now pleased to welcome new chairs for NDSA working groups -- you can learn about them and the working groups through the NDSA Leadership web page.
Members of the Coordination Committee serve staggered three year terms. Five members of the coordinating committee have completed their terms, and will be retiring as of the Fall meeting. We gratefully thank Jonathan Crabtree, Meg Phillips, John Spencer, Helen Tibbo, and Kate Wittenberg for their many contributions.
Following a public call for nominations, there is a slate of five candidates to join the coordination committee:
Bradley Daigle, Partnerships/Content Lead, APTrust
Carol Kussman, Digital Preservation Analyst, U of Minnesota Libraries
Mary Molinaro, Chief Operating Officer & Services Manager, DPN
Gabby Redwine, Digital Archivist at Yale
Helen Tibbo, Alumni Distinguished Professor, SLIS, UNC-Chapel Hill
Voting will be open from August 1st-August 15th. All organizational contacts will receive a link to the voting mechanisms and candidate statements in advance of the voting period. The primary representative of each member organization may vote once for up to five out of six candidates, and those candidates receiving the most votes overall will be elected.
Streamlining Working Groups and Interest Groups
As NDSA grows, we aim to streamline the process of forming and convening NDSA groups. Currently, all NDSA groups are chartered by the Coordination Committee. The CC and WG chairs propose to enable NDSA members to directly generate Interest Groups and Working Groups at will, using an open process, in order (respectively) to discuss mutual interests, and advance joint projects..
The full process is documented here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OmC1YVkeTvbkrwoPmsNsZaDA-UpksxXaCSOanEIXEVM/. In sum, we aim to require of groups only that they be documented publicly, be open to participation, be transparent in discussion and outputs, have a designated Facilitator, and garner the involvement of at least three individual participants from different organizations.
WGs and IGs are encouraged and authorized to share news, events, calls for comments, and draft outputs (with appropriate NDSA branding and WG attribution) through the NDSA mailing lists and social media channels. Final (non-draft) reports and recommendations will be published on the NDSA website after review by NDSA-CC.
Interest Groups will remain the gateway for new members into NDSA activities, and the existing Content, Standards and Practices, Infrastructure, and Innovation Working Groups will be redesignated as Interest Groups. (The Outreach WG will be sunsetted, as scheduled earlier, and its communication activities have been integrated into the scope of NDSA leadership, our host organization, and other interest groups.)
Ongoing projects will be formally recognized and documented as Working Groups:
Digital Preservation 2016 Program WG - Helen Tibbo and Bethany Nowviskie
Web Archiving Survey 2016 WG - Christie Moffat
Innovation Award 2016 WG - Jane Mandelbaum
National Agenda 2016 WG - Micah Altman
We welcome comments on this process, and proposals for new Interest Group and Working Group topics.
This fall, we look forward to seeing you at Digital Preservation 2016. During the conference the community will have an opportunity to welcome in the new members Coordination Committee; congratulate the recipients of the digital innovation awards; see the results of the web archiving survey; hear about many the other community initiatives will be presented in posters, panels and papers; meet with others in their working and interest groups; and listen to Bergis Jules’s keynote talk.
We encourage everyone to join us at Digital Preservation 2016; to join a Interest Group as member or volunteer coordinator; and to vote in the upcoming Coordinating Committee Elections. And if you haven’t already, please follow @NDSA2 on Twitter, put November 9-10 on your calendar for Digital Preservation 2016, and send your updated contact information to [log in to unmask].
Very Best,
Micah Altman & Bethany Nowviskie
On behalf of the NDSA Coordinating Committee