NDIIPP and the Online Video Revolution

It barely needs to be said that video is a great way to get ideas across in a succinct and entertaining manner.

But with the increased acceleration of broadband internet adoption, videos are increasingly becoming a primary information source (and search engines are recognizing this).

The digital preservation community is only beginning to get into video in a big way.

NDIIPP has produced a series of videos over the past six years that touch on digital stewardship issues that are as diverse as NDIIPP’s interests: the challenges of data packaging for preservation; innovative approaches to web archiving; how young people are addressing digital stewardship issues; and many others.

This “Digital Preservation Video Series” will continue to expand, and we welcome your ideas on areas we should cover.

We also have had the pleasure of hosting a number of visiting lecturers to the Library, and we’ve recorded many of their presentations and made them available for viewing in the comfort of your own home.

These include talks by Gordon Bell of Microsoft Research; Siva Vaidhyanathan, the author of the Googlization of Everything and the “The Anarchist in the Library”; Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media; and many others.

Additionally, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Outreach Working Group has a “Storytellers” action team that is working to make videos of some of the most compelling digital preservation stories they can find. Submit your story now!

In addition to the video activity we’re directly involved in, we’ve also tried to highlight some of our favorite digital stewardship-oriented videos from around the web and around the world.

These include the series of “Team Digital Preservation” videos from Digital Preservation Europe; a CBS Sunday Morning segment on “Dealing With Data Rot”; and a Voice of America video on the size of the Library’s digital collections.

Other interesting digital stewardship-related videos we’ve uncovered include:

• An Interview with Helen Tibbo of the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science

• “But Storage is Cheap: Digital Preservation in the Age of Abundance” from Yale University

• “Digital Antiquities,” a dramatic short about a future where only a handful of small businesses in the world have the expertise to recover data from pre-cloud devices

• “Good Government Through Digital Infrastructure and Preservation” from the Minnesota Historical Society

• “New Roles for Research Libraries: Digital Curation for Preservation,” a panel discussion hosted by the Association of Research Libraries

• “Online Photo Sharing in Plain English” from Common Craft

• “Preserving the British Library’s C19 Newspaper Collection with Planets: a short film”

• “Preserving Digital Content in the 21st Century” from the Minnesota Historical Society

• “Preserv Us! The story of the Preserv project by the people behind it”

• “Web Archiving: How We’re Preserving the Web” from the British Library

Have you made a video that you want to share? What are your favorite digital preservation and stewardship videos?