Building a Digital-First Archive (How Hard Could that Be?)

Podcast Link: https://bit.ly/32QiwoB

Abstract:
The Harvard University Archives has announced an ambitious goal to transition to a “digital-first” records management program by 2026. This presentation focuses on issues surrounding the long-term preservation of digital records, looking first at the technical and social infrastructure necessary to ensure effective and sustainable persistence of record accessibility, integrity, authenticity, and usability, and then, discussing how we can know whether those goals have been achieved.

Biography:
Stephen Abrams is head of digital preservation for the Harvard Library, with responsibility for policy, strategic planning, innovation, and oversight of Library’s preservation initiatives, systems, and services. He has been active in the digital library community for over 20 years and has served in an advisory or governing capacity for many projects and organizations, including CA.gov Web Archive, Cobweb, Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation (4C), Dat-in-the-Lab, DataONE, End-of-Term Web Archive, Facade, Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI), International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), Jewish Women’s Archive, JHOVE and JHOVE2, Make Data Count (MDC), National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA), PLANETS, and PRONOM, and program committees for the DLF, IDCC, iPRES, IS&T Archiving, JCDL, and Open Repositories conferences. His doctoral research focuses on frameworks for evaluating the efficacy of digital preservation activities when viewed as technically-mediated human communication across time and concomitant technical and cultural distance.