We are pleased to announce that the Washington, DC National Digital Stewardship Residency class for 2015 has now been chosen! Five very accomplished people have been selected from a highly competitive field of candidates. The new residents will arrive in Washington, DC this June to begin the program. Updates on the program, including more information on the resident projects, will be published in The Signal during the coming months.
The new residents are listed in the Library of Congress press release below:
2015 Class of National Digital Stewardship Residents Selected
The Library of Congress, in conjunction with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, has named five members to the 2015 class of the National Digital Stewardship Residency program. The 12-month program begins in June 2015.
The NDSR program offers recent master’s degree graduates/doctoral candidates in specialized fields–library science, information science, museum studies, archival studies and related technology–the opportunity to gain valuable professional experience in digital preservation. Residents will start the program with an intensive digital stewardship workshop at the Library of Congress, followed by specialized project work at one of five host institutions in the Washington, D.C. area. The projects will allow them to acquire hands-on knowledge and skills regarding collection, selection, management, long-term preservation and accessibility of digital assets.
The residents listed were selected by a committee of experts from the Library of Congress, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and other organizations, including the host institutions:
- John Caldwell of Lutherville, Maryland. Caldwell, who has studied at the University of Maryland, will be resident in the U.S. Senate Historical Office to study and assess current Senate workflows in appraisal, management, ingest, description and transfer of digital assets. He will benchmark current policies against best practices.
- Valerie Collins of Eagle River, Alaska. Collins, who has studied at Dalhousie University, will be resident at the American Institute of Architects to co-lead testing and implementation of an institutional digital repository system to preserve born-digital records that represent AIA’s intellectual capital or that have permanent value for the history of the architectural profession.
- Nicole Contaxis of Easton, Connecticut. Contaxis, who has studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, will be resident at the National Library of Medicine to create a pilot workflow for the curation, preservation and presentation of a historically valuable software product developed by the National Library of Medicine which is deemed to be historically noteworthy due to its usage by a user community and/or its distinctive technical properties. This is at risk of being lost due to obsolescence.
- Jaime Mears of Deltaville, Virginia. Mears, who has studied at the University of Maryland, will be resident at the D.C. Public Library to create a sustainable, public-focused lab, tools, and instruction for building public knowledge and skills around the complex problems of personal digital recordkeeping.
- Jessica Tieman of Lincoln, Illinois. Tieman, who has studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will be resident in the Government Publishing Office; to certify GPO’s Federal Digital System as a Trustworthy Digital Repository and to conduct an internal audit to help achieve the goal of certification.
For more information about the National Digital Stewardship Residency program, including information about how to be a host, partner or resident for next year’s class, visit www.loc.gov/ndsr/.