Introduction
Digital preservation relies on a wide range of skills and services, so digital preservation managers need to coordinate a diverse set of skills, policies, tools and services from disparate sources. For some organisations digital preservation is entirely new and the relevant resources will need to be assembled for the first time. Even established programmes will face new challenges and therefore the range of tools and services required may constantly change. Hence the ability to communicate with other staff, departments, and organisations has emerged as a key skill for successful digital preservation managers.
Because technology and staff continue to change, communication and advocacy must be an ongoing rather than a one-off activity.
In the early days of digital preservation, communication and advocacy involved blunt statements about the social and economic impact of data loss and obsolescence. As solutions have emerged, so messages have had to become more subtle.
Advocacy 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.
In an institutional setting this means understanding all the agents involved in a digital object lifecycle, helping them to prioritise and support those actions that make and keep collections robust, and discouraging those actions which put collections at risk. Over the years the DPC has provided numerous tools to support internal advocacy including the Digital Preservation Business Case Toolkit, the Curation Costs Exchange and a very substantial body of blog posts and reports. There’s no shortage of resources, but the need remains for digital preservation staff to be persistent and effective advocates for their work.
This one-day training workshop 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:
- Identify common challenges when advocating for digital preservation within organisations which do not manage content as a core function
- Align advocacy messages with organisational priorities
- Demonstrate ways of identifying the value and relevance of digital preservation
- Help attendees build their own tailor-made advocacy messages
Indicative Programme
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10.00 - Registration opens, tea and coffee
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10.30 - Welcome and Introductions
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10.45 - Interrogating the challenge and support to address it.
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11.30 - Thinking strategically: tools and tactics for advocating within your organisation
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13.00 - Lunch (provided)
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14.00 - What’s worked: stories of success
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14.45 - Exercise: strategizing and developing and elevator pitch (With tea and coffee).
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15.15 - Feedback and elevator pitches
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16.00 - The Speech: using key moments to embed and win support outside your organisation
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16.30 - Close
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