The following is a guest post by Jefferson Bailey, Strategic Initiatives Manager at Metropolitan New York Library Council and co-chair of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group.
The NDSA Innovation Working Group is pleased to launch the Digital Stewardship Innovation Ideas (DSII) Challenge for 2014!
As the challenge title notes, it’s about ideas: big ideas or creative ideas for how we can meet the challenges of digital stewardship. Don’t worry if it’s something you yourself could tackle or not – we want to hear from you so take a few minutes to jot it down and share it.
The NDSA is launching this challenge to encourage the community to look, think and act on the research priorities identified in the 2014 National Digital Stewardship Agenda. Released last summer, the Agenda integrates the perspective of dozens of experts to provide funders and decision-makers with insight into emerging technological trends, gaps in digital stewardship capacity and key areas for development.
The Agenda suggests a number of important research areas for the digital stewardship community to consider, and a common challenge for each of these areas is the limited amount of empirical evidence available to support them. We hope that launching the DSII Challenge and encouraging you to share your ideas will develop a shared evidence base that can be used to address some or all of the Agenda’s research priorities.
Here are the details about the DSII Challenge and how to submit your idea(s):
The Digital Stewardship Innovation Ideas (DSII) Challenge: Submit an Innovative Idea
The DSII Challenge aims to encourage and spur innovation in the digital stewardship community, particularly in improving the longevity of preservation systems and media. The Challenge is open to anyone and everyone from industry, government and academia.
Challenge Application Entry Requirements
Each submission must specifically propose an innovative idea related to one of the following research priorities of the 2014 National Agenda for Digital Stewardship:
- Applied Research for Cost Modeling and Audit Modeling
- Understanding Information Equivalence and Significance
- Policy Research on Trust Frameworks
- Preservation at Scale
- The Evidence Base for Digital Preservation
The submission shall meet the minimal requirements listed below:
- The submission describes an idea that is understandable by both technical and non-technical professionals who work in the field of digital content management (e.g., information technology specialists, computer scientists, curators, archivists, media specialists);
- The submission explicitly describes the innovative aspect of the idea.
How to Participate
To submit an idea, go to this website, http://dsii.ideascale.com, and click the “new idea” button. You will then be asked to add a title (64 characters or less) and description. You will also have the option to add tags to the idea.
1. Title (64 characters or less)
What is your idea? Be as specific as possible.
2. Description (500 words):
Use this area to explicitly address each of the following:
- Digital Stewardship Research Area Addressed in Your Idea.
- What makes this idea innovative?
- Who would benefit and how?
- What risks, uncertainties or costs would make it challenging to expand this idea?
- Do you have a non-text representation (image, audio, video) of this idea that would be useful to help explain it? If so, please include a URL where it can be viewed.
How the Challenges Will Be Recognized
The Innovation Working Group will present the best of the challenge ideas at the Digital Preservation 2014 meeting, and solicit views on how the challenge might become reality in the future.