Overview[]
The NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group works to facilitate a broad understanding of the role and benefit of standards in digital preservation and how to use them effectively to ensure durable and usable collections.
In addition, the Working Group seeks to identify, promote and widely disseminate practices found to be effective for selecting, organizing, describing, managing, preserving and serving digital content, in collaboration with other individuals and organizations where appropriate.
Current Working Group activities include:
- Initiating a project to improve Wikipedia's coverage of digital preservation in general, but particularly in these areas:
- Digital preservation terms, concepts, theories, strategies and history
- Standards, best practices and common methods for:
- Packaging, transferring or modeling digital content
- Preserving the usability of digital content long-term
- Encoding and wrapping digital content using file formats, compression schemes, etc.
- Describing digital content using metadata
- Preservation repository architecture, operations and policies
- Certifying the trustworthiness of preservation repositories
- Related large-scale initiatives
- Conducting broad surveys of institutions responsible for digital preservation to:
- Reveal current and ideal digital preservation staffing levels and functions
- Identify the standards and best practices that are actually in use at these institutions.
