Getting Started with Advocacy for Digital Preservation (Western Timezones)

28th July, 1400 - 1530 UTC and 29th July, 1400 - 1530 UTC (click for local times)

This training has been timed to be suitable for attendees in Europe, Africa and the Americas, but you are welcome to attend whichever session you prefer.

Introduction

Digital preservation relies on a wide range of skills and services, so practitioners and managers must coordinate a diverse set of skills, policies, tools and services from disparate sources within and outside their organisations. The ability to communicate the importance of digital preservation with other staff, departments, and organisations has, therefore, emerged as a key skill for our community so we can advocate for the funding and resources we required. Plus, with continuous changes in technology and the skills needed, communication and advocacy must be an ongoing rather than a one-off activity.

In the early days of digital preservation, advocacy for digital preservation involved blunt statements about the social and economic impact of data loss and obsolescence. As solutions have emerged, our messages have had to become more subtle. Advocating for digital preservation has become increasingly about identifying stakeholders and helping them understand:

• how their choices make digital collections more or less resilient; and
• the benefits they will accrue from the active management of well-formed and accessible digital materials
• the necessity of investment – whether time, money, or other resources – and the extent to which it is required to achieve these benefits.

The DPC provides numerous tools to support internal advocacy including the Executive Guide on Digital Preservation, the Digital Preservation Business Case Toolkit, the Curation Costs Exchange, the DPC Rapid Assessment Model and a very substantial body of blog posts and reports.  There is no shortage of resources, but the need remains for digital preservation staff to be persistent and effective advocates for their work.

This online training workshop takes place in two short sessions over two-days, and will help provide attendees with skills and ideas for identifying stakeholders and champions required to affect change, ways to showcase digital preservation as an indispensable service for their organisation, and resources to help support their organisational advocacy activities.

The workshop will help attendees:

• Identify common challenges when advocating for digital preservation
• Align advocacy messages with organisational priorities
• Identify the audiences for these messages
• Demonstrate ways of identifying the value and relevance of digital preservation
• Help attendees build their own tailor-made advocacy campaign

Who should come?

This workshop will interest:

• Archivists, librarians and curators managing digital content
• Digital preservation specialists and repository managers who need to make a case for a digital preservation programme at their organization

• Postgraduate students or early career professionals with an interest in learning more about digital preservation advocacy

Program

This training has been timed to be suitable for attendees in Europe, Africa and the Americas, but you are welcome to attend whichever session you prefer.

This training will be delivered in two short instructor-led blocks with an exercise set at the end of the first day that attendees will undertake offline before returning the following day.

Timings are for UTC and are as follows (click for local timings):

Day 1: 28th July

Day 2: 29th July

DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy 

The DPC Community is guided by the values set out in our Strategic Plan and aims to be respectful, welcoming, inclusive and transparent - the same applies to #DPConnect sessions. We encourage diversity in all its forms and are committed to being accessible to everyone who wishes to engage with the topic of digital preservation, whilst remaining technology and vendor neutral. We ask all those who are part of this community and/or attending a #DPConnect session to be positive, accepting, and sensitive to the needs and feelings of others in alignment with our DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy.