User:Kawenask/Digital Stewardship

Introduction
Stewardship, in library and archives, is usually assumed to mean the management of resources, collections, and materials. Interestingly, neither the American Library Association nor the Society for American Archivists have an official definition of what stewardship means in their respective fields. Stewardship encompasses more than just “taking care” of the materials, it also includes policy making and providing pathways for access. As the world moves towards more and more digital objects and items, libraries and archives need to be prepared to respond.

Issues in Digital Stewardship
Traditional archival perspectives on stewardship do not always translate to digital stewardship, which Clifford Lynch points out in his article, “Stewardship in the ‘Age of Algorithms.’” Lynch says that providing long-term access to data for researchers is not as easy as it may seem and uses the Library of Congress’ (LOC) Twitter archive as an example. An institution may be able to pay for the storage of the data but questions still remain about how the data will be accessed when or if its original infrastructure fails. For example, if Twitter were to shut down today, the LOC has its archive but how would the LOC provide access to the tweets without Twitter? Lynch argues that institutions have to create software that mimics hardware. In this case, the LOC would have to create software that mimics Twitter. Though the LOC may have access to funds that could support this idea, many (if not most) institutions do not. Lynch also argues that digital stewardship should focus less on the preservation of items or artifacts and more on the experiences of users, especially when our content is selected specifically for us. He gives several possibilities for documenting this experience.

Digital Stewardship Skills
What kind of skills are needed to be a digital steward? Existing literature acknowledges that digital stewardship and preservation continues to be an emerging field, but in an attempt to answer this question, Griesginer, Petlzmann, Blumenthal, et. al., sent a survey to participants in the National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR), a joint collaboration between the Library of Congress and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The results of the survey identified six areas needed for successful digital stewardship - technical skills, knowledge of standards and best practices, research responsibilities, communication skills, project management abilities, professional output responsibilities. A seventh area, personality requirements, was also coded into their results but was removed from analysis.

Surprisingly, technical skills ranked at the bottom, followed by professional output responsibilities. Respondents ranked communication, research, project management skills, and knowledge of best practices and standards as essential or very important to digital stewardship. Griesginer, Petlzmann, Blumental, et. al, conclude that, “Digital stewards are qualified to manage, preserve, and provide access to various new and/or challenging forms of media. They may also engage in, among other things: coding and scripting; digitization; hardware and software implementation; public outreach; and special media format management and migration.” Technological skills may not always be necessary but certainly help in the job.

Digital Stewardship CurriculumAs stated above, digital stewardship also includes providing access to materials and information; otherwise, what are we saving all this information for? In the age of wanting (and expecting) information right away, it is also important to remember that when working with indigenous collections, not all knowledge, objects, and materials can or should be freely shared. The fourth module in the Digital Stewardship Curriculum created by the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation (CDSC) at Washington State University suggests that when creating access policies and pathways to indigenous collections, consider the community’s culture and values. For example, some knowledge is genealogically specific thus people who do not descend from a certain ancestor should not view that piece of information. In addition, if you are unsure about a collection (i.e. how to describe items, what levels of access are appropriate, etc.), take the initiative to involve the community to find out what is important to them and what knowledge can be shared freely (or not). This will also help to create a digitization plan (as evidenced in Module 2 of the curriculum) because you will be able to prioritize what should be digitized first and what can wait.

Stewardship, digital or traditional, is much more than just taking care of materials or ensuring long term preservation, especially as it is no longer adequate to simply replicate copies of digital data and items, store them on a server, and consider that long-term preservation. Responsible digital stewardship is creating policies and pathways that ensure, not only preservation, but long-term access to the items or collections. Institutions may have to take it upon themselves to (re)create pathways for accessing these digital items when the original technology goes obsolete.