This summer the National Digital Stewardship Alliance turns its attention to leadership renewal. We gratefully thank our outgoing working group chairs and Coordinating Committee members for their service across the transition period to our new home at the Digital Library Federation. And we are pleased to welcome new chairs for our working groups — you can learn more about all of these people on the NDSA Leadership page.
Members of the NDSA Coordinating Committee serve staggered three year terms and five members will have completed their terms, retiring as of the Fall meeting. We thank Jonathan Crabtree, Meg Phillips, John Spencer, Helen Tibbo, and Kate Wittenberg for their many contributions.
Following a public call for nominations, we are presenting to members a slate of five candidates to join the Coordinating Committee. Between now and August 15th, NDSA members will have the opportunity to affirm and endorse these candidates by vote. (One vote per member organization, with information sent via email to institutional contacts.)
Here are statements from the candidates, presented in alphabetical order:
Bradley Daigle
Bradley Daigle is currently content and strategic expert for the Academic Preservation Trust as well as cultural heritage initiatives and strategic partnerships at the University of Virginia Library. He has spent the last several years organizing and facilitating the use of enterprise preservation services. He has been PI on an IMLS grant (AIMS: An Inter-Instutional Model for Stewardship) with international partners whose goal was to create successful workflows for born digital materials. He is also governance chair of the statewide partnership, the Virginia Heritage. More at LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradleydaigle
Building on the NDSA’s previous work, the future holds great promise as we grow membership and increase engagement. Expanding deep focus initiatives beyond the excellent work done with web archiving and balancing between conceptual exploration and practical implementation, the Coordinating Committee should continue to help develop digital preservation methods critical to our profession’s future. Working across the Alliance and with our co-chairs, I will advocate for the systemic changes we need to be effective stewards of our cultural heritage.
Carol Kussman
My interest in the NDSA Coordinating Committee stems from being involved with NDSA and its various working groups from its inception. During this time of transition, NDSA needs to further develop its partnership with the Digital Library Federation (DLF) while keeping its own identity and strong foundation. The new partnership with DLF increases the diversity of NDSA’s knowledge base by introducing DLF members to the activities of the NDSA. I enjoy working with the diverse organizations (large, small, government, non-profit, for profit…) that come together in NDSA to discuss similar issues. While we will never all need the same thing, NDSA provides a place to discuss concerns, share ideas and explore solutions which is valuable to all. I would like to assist with this endeavor by serving on the Coordinating Committee.
My career with electronic records began at the Minnesota State Archive working within the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, the precursor to NDSA; I am now a Digital Preservation Analyst with the University of Minnesota Libraries. In this role, I work across many departments in the Libraries, and outside the Libraries through the statewide Minnesota Digital Library Program. I address current and future requirements for long-term preservation of electronic records including the areas of arches and special collection, information and data repositories, and journal publishing. As co-chair of the Electronic Records Task Force my efforts focus on developing and implementing workflows for ingesting, processing, and providing access to incoming electronic materials that are part of the Archives and Special Collections units. As an inaugural Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) trainer, I work with Minitex to provide digital preservation training in the region on a regular basis. I am also on the Steering Committee of the Electronic Records Section of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and teach the Arrangement and Description of Electronic Records class for SAA.
Mary Molinaro
Last year I took a position with the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) after having worked for the majority of my career as a librarian at the University of Kentucky Libraries. My tenure at Kentucky afforded me the opportunity to facilitate the transition of our collective work in managing analog collections to creating and preserving digital information. At Kentucky I had the opportunity to work in support of the development of processes for the digitization of collections and in making content available to users. I also worked internationally with libraries in Vietnam, in Tunisia (as a Fulbright Sr. Specialist) and in Ecuador (with the support of the American Embassy) to help local institutions build infrastructure to support broader access for their citizenry to digital information. While working in this digital arena I became increasingly concerned about the long term viability of the digital information on which we have become reliant. It is this concern that pushed my now long-standing interest and commitment to developing real solutions for digital preservation. I serve as an anchor instructor for the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) program and have served on the Steering Committee for that program. As Chief Operating Officer for DPN I have had the opportunity to talk with many institutions about their digital processes and hear about the issues with which they are struggling. It is my firm belief that the solutions for access, tool development, delivery, and the preservation of digital information will come faster and better in community than in isolation. I believe the NDSA has a strong role to play in helping our community work together to develop solutions that work and to create tools that will help us succeed. I would welcome the opportunity to serve NDSA in helping the organization move forward toward developing solutions that work for all.
Gabby Redwine
Since 2013 I have been Digital Archivist at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, where I work collaboratively across different units at Yale, as well as with colleagues at other institutions in the US and abroad, to build a sustainable program to support the acquisition, capture, arrangement and description, preservation, and access of born-digital archival materials. I led Yale University Library’s Born Digital Working Group in the development of a vision and three-year roadmap for born-digital archival materials in Yale’s libraries and museums, which we are in the process of implementing. As co-chair of the Yale-wide Web Archiving Working Group, I worked with other group members to develop a Strategic Plan for Web Archiving at Yale and write a report that identified gaps and strategic objectives for the next two years, which we are in the process of implementing. In my capacity as chair of the Advisory Committee on Library Staff Diversity & Inclusion (2015-2016) I led the group in drafting recommendations that position civility and mutual respect training as part of a larger change framework that includes clear behavioral expectations, open communication, and accountability. I also led a joint group of administrators and diversity committee members in drafting Yale University Library (YUL) Community Values. Previously I was Archivist and Electronic Records/Metadata Specialist at the Harry Ransom Center. Recent publications include Collecting Digital Manuscripts and Archives (co-author, SAA’s Trends in Archives Practice series, forthcoming), Personal Digital Archiving (Digital Preservation Coalition, 2015), and Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories (co-author, CLIR, 2013). I am a member of the NDSA Standards & Practice Working Group and the Society of American Archivists’ Mentoring Program Subcommittee, and have served on the program committees for iPres, DH (Digital Humanities), and the SAA Research Forum, and as a grant reviewer for NEH.
My interest in serving on the NDSA Coordinating Committee stems from my work at Yale to develop strategic vision in different areas related to the stewardship of born-digital materials. I am committed to developing initiatives and devising solutions that address the needs of libraries, archives, museums, and other organizations large and small, well-resourced and underfunded, new and well-established, traditional and ground-breaking. My strong communication, leadership, and administrative skills, as well as my experience and commitment to working collaboratively to identify gaps and solve problems, will contribute to the Coordinating Committee’s efforts to collaborate with the working groups to provide strategic leadership for NDSA.
Helen Tibbo
Dr. Tibbo is a current member of the Coordinating Committee running for re-election and is presently serving as chair of Digital Preservation 2016.
Dr. Tibbo is an Alumni Distinguished Professor at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), and teaches in the areas of archives and records management, digital preservation and access, appraisal, and archival reference and outreach. She is also a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and was SAA President 2010-2011. From 2006-2009, Dr. Tibbo was the Principal Investigator (PI) for the IMLS (Institute for Museum and Library Services)-funded DigCCurr I project that developed an International Digital Curation Curriculum for master’s level students. She is also the PI for DigCCurr II (2008-2012) that extends the Digital Curation Curriculum to the doctoral level. In 2009, IMLS awarded Prof. Tibbo two additional projects, Educating Stewards of Public Information in the 21st Century (ESOPI-21) and Closing the Digital Curation Gap (CDCG). ESOPI-21 is a partnership with UNC’s School of Government to provide students with a Master’s of Science in Library/Information Science and a Master’s of Public Administration so that they can work in the public policy arena concerning digital preservation and curation issues and laws. CDCG is a collaboration with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Digital Curation Center (DCC), both of the United Kingdom, to explore educational and guidance needs of cultural heritage information professionals in the digital curation domain in the US and the UK. Dr. Tibbo is a co-PI with collaborators from the University of Michigan and the University of Toronto on a National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC)-funded project to develop standardized metrics for assessing use and user services for primary sources in government settings. This project extends work that explored user-based evaluation in academic archival settings funded by the Mellon Foundation. Prof. Tibbo is also co-PI on the IMLS-Funded POlicy-Driven Repository Interoperability (PoDRI) project lead by Dr. Richard Marciano and conducted test audits of repositories in Europe and the US with the European Commission-funded ARPARSEN project during the summer of 2011.