The document was released today as Digital Preservation 2013 gets underway in Alexandria, VA.
From a National Digital Stewardship Alliance Announcement (NDSA):
“The Agenda identifies our most pressing digital preservation challenges as a nation and gives us the direction to deal with them collaboratively,” said Andrea Goethals, the Digital Preservation and Repository Services Manager at the Harvard University Library and one of the Agenda’s authors.
Effective digital stewardship is vital to maintaining the public records necessary for understanding and evaluating government actions; the scientific evidence base for replicating experiments, building on prior knowledge; and the preservation of the nation’s cultural heritage, but in the current resource-challenged climate, digital stewardship issues often get lost in the shuffle.
Still, there is broad recognition that the need to ensure that today’s valuable digital content remains accessible, useful, and comprehensible in the future is a worthwhile effort, supporting a thriving economy, a robust democracy, and a rich cultural heritage.
The 2014 National Agenda integrates the perspective of dozens of experts and hundreds of institutions to provide funders and other executive decision-makers with insight into emerging technological trends, gaps in digital stewardship capacity, and key areas for development.
The Agenda informs individual organizational efforts, planning, goals, and opinions with the aim to offer inspiration and guidance and suggest potential directions and key areas of inquiry for research and future work in digital stewardship.
The Agenda is designed to generate comment and conversation over the coming months in order to impact future activities, policies, strategies and actions that ensure that digital content of vital importance to the nation is acquired, managed, organized, preserved and accessible for as long as necessary.
In addition to the discussions during the Digital Preservation 2013 meeting, a series of webinars will be scheduled over the next few months to provide further opportunities for the digital stewardship community to learn more about the agenda and explore opportunities to put it into practice.
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