Please join us for our opening plenary. A brief introduction to the event will be followed by updates to NDSA’s Strategic Plans and then the 2019 Innovation Awards.
We will kick off the conference with a keynote from Alison Langmead entitled, "Sustainability Is Not Preservation."
The ongoing sustainability of digital projects is of critical concern to both project creators and stewards alike, and while much of the conversation in and around digital sustainability practices takes place in arenas adjacent to, or connected with, digital preservation, it is increasingly important to be purposeful about identifying the appropriate use cases for each of these approaches. In this talk, Alison Langmead will discuss her experiences co-creating and working with the
Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap (STSR). Having now presented a two-day version of this sustainability workshop with over 100 people in six locations across the United States, the STSR team has become even firmer in their conviction that, for sustainability practices to be successful, project leaders must keep the changing, socially-contingent nature of both their project and their working environment(s) consistently in mind as they initiate, maintain, and support their own work. We feel that this approach constitutes a break from traditional preservation practices and standards that assume, and in some cases require, unchanging fixity from preserved digital products for an indefinite period into the future. Sustainability planning, by contrast, flourishes best when the fluid, changing nature of contemporary digital practices and products are accepted, and the possibility of a project retirement date is assumed. This rupture can mean that, for users to take up digital preservation practices, they must significantly modify workflows and (even) goals, but it can also mean that these users do not take up preservation practices at all, finding them impractical for their purposes.