Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Digital Curation and the Public: Strategies for Education and Advocacy

Digital Curation and the Public: Strategies for Education and Advocacy. Jaime Mears, Mike Ashenfelder. The Signal. April 6, 2016.
     The Washington DC Public Library hosted Digital Curation and the Public: Strategies for Education and Advocacy that included a tour of the Memory Lab, a public-facing digitization lab, and a workshop, Methods of promoting digital curation to the public, that reaches the audience by creating targeted promotional and educational material about digital preservation.
  • Case studies are incredibly effective,  "especially when the absence of a digital record proves why it should have been preserved". 
  • Other methods include train-the-trainer programs and creating engaging educational resources, such as the Activist’s Guide to Archiving Video.
  • Sometimes effectiveness is a matter of timing, such as waiting to contact people until they have enough material to care about preservation. 
  • Including preservation education into larger training sessions that address other needs.
  •  Identify four or five communities to support and identify the challenges and strategies to working each community.  
  • Digital content creators have to understand that preservation is a necessary part of effective life-cycle management and the long-term value of content.

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