Digital Preservation is People

A site for all people concerned with digital preservation

DPIP

This is the first blog post of the new Digital Preservation is People initiative (DPIP) and the announcement of its 2024 Mission Statement.

DPIP is a member association that is designed to accommodate everyone in the broad church that is “digital preservation”.

DPIP describes a future-facing digital preservation that distinguishes itself from a single discipline anchored in the GLAM institutions and places it in the context of all who are interconnected in the discipline.

We often focus on initiatives and institutions with specific capabilities but unique skills (and requirements) are brought by people with vastly different training:

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Activists Archaeologists Archivists
Architects Curators Historians
Humanists Information Mgmt Professionals Librarians
Maintainers Scientists Software Developers

Not to mention our end-users' requirements and contributions.

People all the way down

Digital preservation is people all the way down, yet, the current field of digital preservation is defined so narrowly as to be too small an ecosystem. The umbrella of those who are recognized as engaging in digital preservation across the globe needs to be broadened.

DPIP wants to see digital preservation evolve to become a distributed set of individuals with roles and responsibilities that complement the function of digital preservation. The key is that it is decentralized both within and outside of institutions and not necessarily just within the “digital preservation” sector.

We want to re-calibrate digital preservation by putting people front and center. We want to generate opportunities for individuals to promote themselves both as part of their day to day work and beyond their current organization. We want individuals to feel more secure because they know that they have opportunities at the end of their current role. Decentralization works to level the playing field so individuals are in control of their development and empowered to push their professional goals further.

We want to see individuals valued, career opportunities increase, and develop a larger support network for the discipline.

Our mission statement describes in much greater detail the thinking behind DPIP including what we have identified as the different impacts and causes of the current digital preservation climate.

Aims

We have set out a plan for the year ahead, with four aims:

  • Amplify the voices of individuals.
  • Remove pay-to-play barriers.
  • Enable radical openness and democracy.
  • Be actively inclusive of, and enabling of other sectors.

Goals

With the following goals for the year (and years) ahead:

  • Create an open access blog for people to share their unique needs and seek barrier-free collaboration.
  • Tackle digital preservation essentialism by being radically open in the sharing and publication of information.
  • Challenge institution- and vendor-led bias in the objectives of the digital preservation community.
  • Promote grassroots and informal community digital preservation meet-ups and information sharing.
  • Engage with ethical and political conversations needed in the industry, for example, the environment, or the treatment of people on a macro scale.
  • Monitor salaries, promote well-paid jobs, and question the publication of poorly paid roles.

Contributing

We have created an open blog for individuals to contribute their own career stories, or issues preventing them from reaching their goals. We will share more about contributing in future updates and on discord.

Platforming

We want to promote quarterly webinars to platform individuals' work.

Engaging

We also have a discord server for collaboration and connections and DPIP communication.

Dialoging

We don't have all of the answers. We want to initiate a dialogue about the potential to become a community-led decentralized organization. This organization might take many shapes and there are certainly missing pieces like guidelines and principles that can create a safety net for individuals who want to comment on the problems in institutions but aren't sure they can.

We want to invite all comments and ideas on all aspects of how this initiative can evolve.

We also want to understand how to welcome from outside of the community and welcome their voices and make digital preservation understandable outside of its bubble.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank those who contributed to the mission statement with their thoughtful review and comments.

Getting started

  1. Read our 2024 Mission Statement.
  2. Join discord and provide your feedback and start the conversation!
  3. For those with ActivityPub like Mastodon you can follow this blog and comment via https://writeas.com/@dpip here. You will also be able to follow future community contributions.
  4. For those on other networks if you have anything else to share, use the hashtag #DPIP or reference “Digital Preservation is People”.

What to expect when you join

We anticipate things will be quiet while folks join the group. Please introduce yourselves and please feel free to get different conversations going.

We want to hold a town-hall to discuss it all further and we will find prompts and gather some questions to think about beforehand. Questions you might have include (even after reading the mission statement) what is this group for? What can it do for me? What can I do for it? And do I have the bandwidth for another organization?

Closing remarks

Thank you all for reading! We are excited to start this journey with you.

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