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= Digital Stewardship = According to the Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, “steward” derives from the Old English meanings of “hall” and “guard,” which speak to the historic roles of stewards as household servants, meal servants, overseers, bookkeepers, ministers, and more.[1] A commitment to service defines stewardship roles, whether in the fields of environmental ethics, economics, health, or information science. The concept can be broken down into two key elements: “the ability to care for, manage, or control persons or things” and “accountability for the proper exercise of that ability.”[2]

Through the lens of organization development, author Peter Block defines stewardship as holding “something in trust for another,” as choosing “service over self-interest,” and as developing partnerships built on empowerment, trust, reciprocity, and “accountability without control or compliance.”[3] Block stresses the need for stewardship to be relationship-focused and outlines the following ideas: “stewardship is the choice for service, “[s]ervice is a stance that relationships are critical,” “[r]elationships are built through partnership, rather than patriarchy,” and “[p]artnership is built on empowerment, not dependency.”[4]

When it comes to stewardship in the archives, scholars Loriene Roy and Ciaran Trace reaffirm the encyclopedia definition of a steward as one who “exercises power and authority but does not have license to do so in a self-serving or careless manner”[5] and share similar ideas to Block in their own assertion of the importance of consultation, which entails iterative and ongoing conversations, collaborations, and relationship building between archives and indigenous communities.[6]

Stepping into the realm of digital archives, stewardship remains service-oriented and grounded in in the cultural heritage community while integrating research data into its processes of creating, maintaining, preserving, disseminating, and exhibiting digital information and materials for present and future use. [7] These processes encompass both digital curation and digital preservation. Digital curation is rooted in the scientific community and includes “maintaining, preserving, and adding value to digital research data throughout its lifecycle” for the purposes of future access, use, and/or transformation.[8] Because it concerns the entire information lifecycle, digital curation encompasses digital preservation, which is grounded in the cultural heritage community and is defined as a “series of actions and interventions required to ensure continued and reliable access to authentic digital objects for as long as they are deemed to be of value.”[9] Preservation actions consist of “[f]ile format identification, characterization, validation, checksum generation,” virus-checking, migration, normalization, emulation, virtualization, and more.[10]

Because digital curation and preservation are just two aspects within the broad concept of digital stewardship, the Sustainable Heritage Network created the “Digital Stewardship Curriculum” to help guide archivists through the complexities of the digital stewardship lifecycle and its processes of creating, receiving, appraising, ingesting, preserving, storing, providing access to, using, and transforming digital materials. The curriculum lays out four main cyclical steps:

1.     Get it: Find, select, prioritize materials, accept donations, digitize originals, and create copies

2.     Check it: Continually ensure that materials in your collections are created and maintained up to your standards for quality, organization, and description

3.     Save it: Preserve and protect materials for the long term. Plan for a secure place to save files that can expand to hold your growing collections.

4.     Share it: Provide access to materials through exhibits, online collections, educational programs. Make available for research.[11]

These steps are amenable to change and meant to be tailored to the specific technical, informational, management, preservation, and other needs of a community. For example, the curriculum also delineates standards to address cultural needs:

1.     Get it: Assess community needs, provide equipment to digitize materials in homes, ensure community values are upheld throughout all policies and processes.

2.     Check it: Define protections for cultural materials. Prioritize collections involving community members. Form a cultural committee to help make informed decisions.

3.     Save it: Preserve materials with cultural values, definitions, and goals in mind. Gather traditional knowledge about care and storage. Reach out to elders and others for support.

4.     Share it: Define access based on cultural protocols for viewing, sharing, and circulating materials. Create levels of access reflecting what already exists in your community.[12]

Other prominent models regarding digital stewardship include the Open Archival Information System Reference Model, the Digital Curation Centre’s Curation Lifecycle Model, and the Research360 Institutional Research Lifecycle Concept. In addition to the Sustainable Heritage Network, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) is another organization concerned with digital stewardship. Launched in July 2010, the NDSA maintains a “national community of practice for digital stewardship” and is dedicated to the long-term preservation of digital content within the educational, government, and not-for-profit sectors.[13] The NDSA advocates for the needs of its organizations and members, and provides opportunities for professional development.

Indigenous Perspective
While scholars like Block have looked to stewardship as a framework to address patriarchal and problematic structures and institutions, others have found fault in the concept. For example, some native communities assert that stewardship is a “promotion of an unequal distribution of power” in that it focuses more on care and management than on sharing stewardship power with indigenous peoples in decision making, policy setting, and everyday access and use of indigenous materials.[14] The unwillingness of American archivists to share power speaks to the colonial roots of the field of Library and Information Science and its establishment as a profession in 1876, a time when U.S. federal policy sought to assimilate and eliminate indigenous peoples. [15] Archivists replicate these colonial practices (of assimilation and elimination) in their resistance to relinquish control over indigenous peoples’ cultural materials.

Indigenous communities have addressed this issue with projects like Mukurtu, a digital community archive established by the Warumungu community (in Australia) and the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation (at the Washington State University).[16] Mukurtu incorporates public input for the elements, tags, and descriptions of records, and enforces detailed, cultural protocols and access restrictions, which, in turn, reverses colonial practices of privilege, facilitates relationship building, and allows for power to be shared among archivists and native communities.

In conclusion, the field of digital stewardship is rooted in a commitment to service, encompasses a complex web of processes, and is evolving in ways that allows for a more ethical distribution of its power. [1] Peter W. Bakken, “Stewardship,” in Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, ed. J. Baird Callicott and Robert Frodeman (Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2009), 282.

[2] Bakken, “Stewardship,” 282.

[3] Peter Block, Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest (San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013), xxiv.

[4] Block, Stewardship, 16.

[5] Bakken, “Stewardship,” 282.

[6] For more information on the importance of consultation, see Loriene Roy and Ciaran Trace, “Beyond Stewardship and Consultation: Use, Care, and Protection of Indigenous Cultural Heritage,” in Cultural Heritage Care and Management: Theory and Practice, ed. Cecilia Lizama Salvatore (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 21.

[7] Jeannette A. Bastian, Michele V. Cloonan, and Ross Harvey. "From Teacher to Learner to User: Developing a Digital Stewardship Pedagogy," Library Trends 59, no. 4 (2011): 607, doi:10.1353/lib.2011.0012.

[8] Digital Curation Centre, “What is Digital Curation?” accessed February 24, 2020, http://bit.ly/2HXRNsu.

[9] Somaya Langley, “Digital Preservation Should Be More Holistic: A Digital Stewardship Approach,” in Digital Preservation in Libraries: Preparing for a Sustainable Future, ed. Jeremy Myntti and Jessalyn Zoom (Chicago: American Library Association, 2019), 95.

[10] Langley, “Digital Preservation Should Be More Holistic,” 95.

[11] Sustainable Heritage Network, “Digital Stewardship Curriculum Page,” accessed February 24, 2020, http://bit.ly/3c6zAH7.

[12] Sustainable Heritage Network, “Digital Stewardship Curriculum Page.”

[13] Langley, “Digital Preservation Should Be More Holistic,” 97.

[14] Roy and Trace, “Beyond Stewardship and Consultation,” 23.

[15] For more information on this history, see Roy and Trace, “Beyond Stewardship and Consultation,” 26.

[16] For more information on Mukurtu, see Roy and Trace, “Beyond Stewardship and Consultation,” 24.