By Rachael Zipperer, Masters Candidate at the University of Texas School of Information
This week is the American Library Association’s Preservation Week, a national campaign to raise awareness about preservation issues and methods.
The Texas Digital Library, of course, supports digital preservation and digital repositories, so I’m spending this week thinking about what, exactly, digital preservation is and highlighting some of the numerous ways TDL members have been working to protect and provide access to collections digitally.
This semester, I’ve been doing a capstone project to complete my master’s degree at UT Austin working with TDL members to learn more about how they’re using digital collections and ways to promote their work. From talking to TDL members about their repositories and digital collections, I learned that one of the biggest challenges in digital preservation work is advocacy: communicating what digital collections management and digital preservation entails and why participating in digital preservation is important.
Check back here for posts about digital preservation and digital collections, and be sure to follow TDL on Twitter and Facebook for some collection highlights this week.
If you’re antsy to learn more about preservation right now, check out ALA’s free webinars from previous Preservation Weeks and TDL’s digital preservation webinar series on YouTube.
Learn more about Rachael’s project at https://main.tdl.org/member-stories/digital-collections-inventory-project/