Digital Preservation of Federal Information Summit

I’m excited and honored to be attending the Digital Preservation of Federal Information Summit this weekend in San Antonio. Dr Martin Halbert of the University of North Texas has invited government information librarians, archivists, technologists, and administrators — including my FGI colleague Jim jacobs! — to mobilize efforts at preserving digital federal government information. If you’d like to follow along, raise issues and ask questions, the twitter hashtag is #govpreserve. Stay tuned as we forge ahead!!

The Digital Preservation of Federal Information Summit will focus on the important topic of preservation and access to at-risk digital government information. This meeting will be held as a pre-conference just before the Spring 2016 CNI conference in the Madero Room of the Westin Riverwalk hotel in San Antonio, Texas…Our intent in convening this summit is to initiate a call to action and develop an agenda for mobilization of efforts well in advance of the inauguration of the new president. This will require careful preparation by high level figures who care about our shared national information heritage.

Stakeholders attending will include leaders of major libraries, thought-leaders in information technology, and program directors of major cultural memory organizations. The summit will bring together a select group of organizational and technical leaders interested in collaborating on of community-based efforts to preserve digital federal information, and developing solutions to the most pressing problems that we face as a nation in ensuring preservation and access to several emergent types of the most at-risk digital government information. These categories of information include, but are not limited to:

• Born digital government information
• Large-scale web archives, including the End-of-Term Crawl content
• Metadata for these types of digital government information aggregations
• Other categories of digitized government information

The aim of this meeting is to 1) engage in a structured and facilitated dialogue with national leaders on these topics, and 2) to begin the development of a national agenda to address the preservation of access for the most pressing categories of at-risk digital government information. The focus of this meeting is sustaining digital, not print, collections of government information.

Meeting Outcomes

The facilitated sessions of the meeting will be structured to result in several outcomes: 1) group consensus on priorities and practical next steps to addressing these priorities, and 2) this information will be used to write up a report after the meeting for broad dissemination and community response and engagement.

Here’s a list of attendees for the meeting:

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