Keynote presentation by Emily Pfotenhauer, WiLS, for a digital preservation symposium coordinated by the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), November 2018. https://dat.nedcc.org/

1. Building the
Community
Emily Pfotenhauer
WiLS
emily@wils.org

2. Team La Crosse Team OWLS
Team Manitowoc County Team Barron County Team Rock County
Team Menominee Nation

3. https://recollectionwisconsin.org/digipres

4. CCDC: Goals
● Provide hands-on learning opportunities for students
● Help small libraries, archives and historical societies gain control
of digital assets
→ NDSA Level 1
● Build statewide community of practice around digital
stewardship

5. CCDC: Partners & models
● Partners
○ UW-Madison iSchool
○ UW-Milwaukee SOIS
○ Training consultant - Amy Rudersdorf, AVP
● Models
○ NDSR
○ Digital POWRR

10. Team Manitowoc:
● Amy Meyer
MCHS Director
● Cameron Fontaine
UW-Milwaukee SOIS
● Peter Shrake
Archivist, Circus
World Museum
Manitowoc County Historical Society

11. Manitowoc County Historical Society
Content: Daryl Cornick Collection
- 3,000 photo negatives (digitized)
- Audio interviews (born-digital)
Challenges:
- Reliance on volunteers
- How do we know we’re doing it “right”?

12. Manitowoc County Historical Society
Project Activities → NDSR Level 1
- Expand inventory of digital content
- Encourage use of standard file formats
- Develop local partnerships for storage
Project Activities → Other
- Establish file naming convention and rename files
- Document process & standards for oral history interviews
- Explore options for online access

13. ● Building WITH the
community
● Building FOR the
community
Image: University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives

14. Highly technical
definitions of
digital preservation
are complicit in
silencing the past.
“Much of the language and specifications
of digital preservation have developed into
complex sets of requirements that
obfuscate many of the practical things
anyone and any organization can do to
increase the likelihood of access to
content in the future. As such, a highly
technical framing of digital preservation
has resulted in many smaller and less
resource rich institutions feeling like they
just can’t do digital preservation, or that
they need to hire consultants to tell them
about complex preservation metadata
standards when what they need to do first
is make a copy of their files.”
Trevor Owens, “Fifteen Guiding
Digital Preservation Axioms” (2017).
http://www.trevorowens.org/2017/06/getting-
beyond-digital-hyperbole-tools-for-looking-
forward/

15. Thank you!
Emily Pfotenhauer
emily@wils.org
https://recollectionwisconsin.org/digipres