Digital Preservation Coalition

The DPC board has approved a new Task Force to review short courses and career development opportunities in digital preservation.

The DPC strategic plan includes a high level objective to support members’ workforces through the provision of specialised training. Recognising the costs of provision and the very great range of expertise required, in 2009 the DPC established a ‘Leadership Programme’ which offered scholarships in order that members could send staff to attend training courses offered by third party providers. Since then, the DPC has made available 24 scholarships to attend ULCC’s Digital Preservation Training Programme, 3 scholarships to attend UKDA’s How to set up and run a data centreand 38 scholarships to attend the British Library’s Digital Preservation the Planets Way. To date this has cost the Coalition just over £14,000 and an allocation of £10,000 is available in financial year 2011-12.

Grants are decided by a small committee of 3 or 4 people drawn from the Board, the Training Provider and the DPC Executive. Grants are advertised and awarded against a clearly defined set of criteria. But the process by which courses are selected to be considered for support from the Leadership Programme is ad hoc. It is entirely based on informal contacts and personal recommendations. No criteria exist and no grounds for prioritising or refusing a request for support have been published. Given the growing number of courses, the demand for more specialised and more diverse training, the DPC needs to be able to respond confidently to members and external agencies alike.

The DPC Career Development and Training Task Force will establish and monitor criteria through which training providers can access support from the DPC Leadership Programme. It will ensure that grants are awarded to credible and viable training courses of demonstrable quality that will help deliver the DPC’s strategic objective. It will identify, assess, monitor and promote short courses that provide informed and credible training in digital preservation and cognate fields.
In this way the Task Force will help to ensure that our members’ workforces are better supported with higher quality and ever more relevant training.

A call for members will be issued shortly and the initial meeting of the group is planned for the last quarter of 2011.  For more details, including a draft terms of reference, see the DPC website area on Task Forces and Working Parties.