Embedding Sustainability into your Digital Preservation Plan using the Levels of Preservation Commitment

Workshop: Embedding Sustainability into your Digital Preservation Plan using the Levels of Preservation Commitment

When: October 27th 2-3:30 p.m. ET

Where: Virtually Via Zoom

Jack O'Grady, Collections and Digital Access Specialist at the Hamilton Public Library Local History and Archives department

Biography: 

Jack O'Grady is an emerging digital preservation professional based in Hamilton, Ontario. Before a career shift, he worked as a consultant assisting clients with information architecture, metadata management, and user access. It was in this position that he developed a passion for sustainability in information work, which he built on at the University of Toronto iSchool with a collaborative concentration in Environmental Studies. Since then, he's been at Hamilton Public Library launching a digital preservation system, serving on the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Carbon Footprint Calculation Support Group, and consulting with local environmental non-profits on digital asset management and migration.

Description:

Digital preservation has always been concerned with the sustainability of fiscal and archival resources, hedging against future disruptions while balancing against the present. Increasingly, digital preservation professionals are being called on to consider environmental sustainability more closely, as well, as the resource cost of digital storage and computation becomes clearer. Adding this new concern to an already complex equation can seem overwhelming, but this workshop walks participants through a methodology that leans on archivists' existing skill in appraisal to embed sustainable decision-making into your digital preservation plan. Introduced by Nancy McGovern and Kari R. Smith at MIT Libraries, the Levels of Preservation Commitment are a simple and easily customizable set of rankings which, when assigned to accessions, determine to what level the archive will commit a proportion of their overall resources for preservation. The central idea of this methodology is for archives to make intentional decisions on which collections to accept additional risk for in return for allocating fewer unsustainable resources, and which require a compromise in the other direction. In this workshop, the methodology is built on to include concerns for environmental sustainability more directly, and methods for customizing it to fit your specific archive's situation are offered along with a detailed process map for carrying out a Levels of Preservation Commitment appraisal.

Zoom details will be shared with registrants the day before the workshop.