Courtney Mumma, TDL Deputy Director, was invited to deliver the plenary talk at Best Practices Exchange 2023 in Athens, GA, at the University of Georgia’s Special Collections Libraries. The following is the full text of that presentation with the couple of slides that included images (most just served as placeholders).

The Future of Digital Preservation

First I want to share my gratitude to the organizers for inviting me today. Thank you Adriane, Brandon and Katherine, and to the Steering, Program, and Local Arrangements committee members, because even when it’s an ‘Un’ conference, I know it’s incredibly challenging to facilitate an event like this. Thank you to our hosts at University of Georgia Special Collections Libraries, and thanks to you all for showing up in the room today. 

I work in San Antonio, TX, at a not-for-profit consortium called the Texas Digital Library that supports technology and facilitates community for over 30 institutions. Texas is one of several states where the work of archivists and librarians is being threatened. Moreover, being a human in Texas who is gay, a woman, a person of color, or transgender, is increasingly dangerous, too, so I want to begin by stating my own dedication to human rights and our commitment to supporting them through our work at the Texas Digital Library consortium in any ways we can.

And, it’s June, so Happy Pride!

Being invited to address this group on this topic feels personally and professionally validating. And, being a Gen Xer, my immediate reaction to feeling validated is to humble myself and fret about what I might say to you all that will be of any use without trying to sell you anything. This quote from the 1989 classic movie “Say Anything” pretty much encompasses my early career aspirations.

I was asked to talk about the future of digital preservation, so I’m going to offer my own perspective from over a decade of service in digital preservation communities. As a mid-career professional, I will talk about the privilege and responsibility of being a seasoned worker. As such, we’ve gathered wisdom and can have an enormous impact on the future of digital preservation, much of which will be presided over by our newer colleagues. I’ll remind us of our early enthusiasm for the stewardship work we do, and suggest how to humbly guide and support our successors.

A little background about my life and career path – I come from a military family and am the first in my family to get a 4 year university degree (it was in English and Sociology if you’re curious). My goal was to be a poet, because poetry had been such a salve growing up. When I saw the reality of being a poet, I decided against it, which left me lost for a while. When I went back to graduate school in my early thirties, it was after deep self-exploration. One of the things I  discovered was that I was adept at finding things out and could apply that skill to libraries and archives. I attended the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and worked closely with Luciana Duranti, a powerful woman at the forefront of digital preservation exploration. Getting into digital preservation was a surprise, but I was drawn to the challenges of preserving digital art, science, news, publications, and the records of cultures and organizations. I was eager to finish up my education and become an archivist or librarian working in digital preservation. 

Today I want to talk about honoring and recapturing that early-career fascination about preserving our cultural heritage. I also want to recognize the wisdom that comes from seasoned experts working on digital preservation in libraries, archives, special collections and other organizations for long enough to know how to get things done. And finally, I will talk about how important fostering a new and more diverse generation of professionals is to the future of digital preservation. The wisest of us in the field will temper our assumptions that the way we’ve done things is the only way to do them. With some humility, we can mentor new archivists and librarians to expand their own visions. This kind of mentorship support is great for anyone coming new to a field, but it’s especially valuable to minoritized communities who will need to navigate traditions based on white colonialism. 

I’ve broken my talk into three sections to offer strategies for a sustainable and value-driven digital preservation future: Wonder, Wisdom and Humility.

WONDER

Let’s start with Wonder.

I’ll share an anecdote about one of my first interviews for a graduate student experience in a municipal archives. I had completed my first year of the Master of Archival Studies and of Library Sciences dual program at the University of British Columbia, and I was pre-interviewing for a term-limited role in a US city I’d previously called home, and where I wanted to spend the summer. I had the comfort of being accompanied by a close friend and fellow student who was from the same city, though she was not interested in the role herself. The discussion was going well, and right as we started to wrap up, the lead archivist said to us that she was relieved to have met and talked with us and felt confident we wouldn’t bring ‘unrealistic expectations based in theory’ that we’d been learning from our instructors at UBC. Wanting to get the position, I smiled politely and agreed that no, no, no, I wouldn’t bring any unwelcome theoretical enthusiasm into the workplace, and would follow their lead instead. Back then, I don’t think the comment really bothered me much, but that interaction stuck with me and has become more and more poignant over time.

I share that story because of what I internalized at the time. It was the idea that my academic understanding of digital preservation is unwelcome in the workplace. And that first experience was reinforced at other jobs over the years, though definitely not all of them. I saw it replicated across all types of institutions where I consulted and taught, and I still see it happening today. 

Do any of you have a similar memory? As a new professional, did you have big ideas and aspirations that turned out to be unwelcome once you got into a job with  limited resources, short staff, and massive backlogs? Did your aspirations to adhere to good digital preservation practice falter somewhat  in the face of ever-changing technologies? Have you ever had to neglect minoritized community collections in favor of processing or preserving collections funded by privileged donors and founders? Show of hands?

I don’t blame the professionals who cautioned against my passion for digital preservation theory and good practice as too eager, too demanding, too keen. From experience, I now understand how demoralizing it can be to work in a field that is undervalued, where we are constantly having to ‘justify our existence’, ‘manage up’, and convince executives, owners, donors, granting bodies, presidents, provosts, legislatures, technologists, managers, and even other librarians and archivists, that digital preservation work is important and essential.

But I wanted to think about Wonder today because it’s also essential to a successful digital preservation future. We need to figure out how to interrupt that series of events that drains us of wonder.. 

We are tired. Because it’s all piling on, isn’t it? The backlogs, the born digital avalanche, the library shelves and freezers full of at-risk items in need of digitization, the cacophony of command line and GUIs we glue and tape together to accomplish ingesting what seems like just the tiniest tip of the iceberg into one or more of several flavors of ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ digital preservation storage choices. We end up wearing so many hats that it’s hard to see from under them at all, let alone see back to that time when we were coming freshly into the profession full of promise and ideas.

WISDOM

After I worked in that first student job at an archives during the summer between semesters, I had more luck. My first job interview as a professional archivist was for a temporary digital archivist position at the City of Vancouver Archives to appraise, arrange and describe the analog and digital records of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games. In the interview, archivists Heather Gordon, Glenn Dingwall and conservator Sue Bigelow asked me what I knew about OAIS and I said something like “SIPs, AIPs DIPs… Bob’s your uncle” and they offered me the job. Oh, and by the way, they said, we don’t actually have a system to do this work, so you’ll have to join us in helping Artefactual Systems, the creators of the internationally renowned Access to Memory software, build this thing called “Archivematica”. And also it’s open source, so please learn all about that and everything that that entails. It was a lot, but I was excited   by the freedom of exploration the position afforded, so I jumped in. 

I was incredibly fortunate that my first job at the City of Vancouver Archives and then, my second at Artefactual Systems, valued the education and enthusiasm I brought as a new professional. I owe much of my professional success to the support that both of those jobs extended to me. Working on technology for digital preservation in environments that prioritized creating processes and workflows centered on foundational concepts allowed us to create the first open source system (arguably the first end-to-end system) and process a very large hybrid collection. At both jobs, I was given room to say no to requests and projects that interrupted my core responsibilities, and I was allotted freedom to explore and inquire. Moreover, both jobs helped me to synthesize my experiences of working with archives and collections with what I’d learned in grad school. Peter Van Garderen and Evelyn McLellan at Artefactual were both archivists, and they wanted the system we were building to honor our foundational understanding of digital preservation concepts while also acknowledging the real-world application of those concepts. And, at both jobs, leadership understood that the value of what we were doing could benefit colleagues all over the world facing the same challenges, so they prioritized creating documentation and technology that could be shared. Further, they gave me ample opportunities to go out into the world and share what we learned together and what we were creating with others facing the same challenges. 

My supervisors and colleagues at those first two jobs offered true mentorship. After over a decade working and teaching digital preservation in communities that gave me a birds-eye view of the state of things, I have seen that my early career experience is the exception to the rule and I am so grateful for that because I believe it set me up for the joyful work I do now. 

When I went out into the world to share ideas at conferences and in professional organizations, I found more mentors, which reflects more accurately how new professionals typically experience mentorship. I cannot emphasize enough how incredible those mentors have been for me over the years. Dr. Nancy McGovern educated me about the history of digital preservation work in archives and libraries in the US and gave me opportunities to teach and lead conference committees. María Matienzo welcomed me into a powerful group of professionals that engaged with early social media and helped me appreciate the value of my own unique contributions. Rachel Frick helped me identify what I really wanted out of a career and lifestyle, and guided me as I positioned myself towards finding my current work at TDL. I met Erin O’Meara early in my career and she helped me network while reinforcing our shared theoretical basis for good practice, and her colleague at UNC, Prof. Cal Lee, has consistently invited me into open source, community-based projects of value to the digital preservation community over time. Finally, Dr. Katherine Skinner has been my role model for a career based in fostering communities of practice. 

The future of digital preservation depends on mentorships like these. And let’s make sure we’re not just passing the baton to mentees that look like us and share our life experiences. Mentorship is especially important to minoritized groups. Organizations can help to prioritize mentorship for minoritized librarians and archivists by creating programs that support those relationships, like diversity residencies and cohorts or affinity groups.

I’m honored that several new professionals have reached out to me over the years, often from positions where they felt they were being undervalued, to mentor them. I take the responsibility seriously. I love this quote from Maya Angelou “In order to be a mentor, and an effective one, one must care. You must care. You don’t have to know how many square miles are in Idaho, you don’t need to know what is the chemical makeup of chemistry, or of blood or water. Know what you know and care about the person, care about what you know and care about the person you’re sharing with.”

I know that I’m suggesting putting on the mentor hat, another hat on the pile of hats, all while many of us, in addition to getting our regular work done in digital preservation, are also contending with long enduring issues like the corporatization of library services and the commodification of cultural heritage, and the legacy of white supremacy and colonization on digital preservation and collection priorities. 

After working on digital preservation for a while, we collect wisdom about how to get things done, or at least how to find out how to get things done. And, before we even start in a profession, we have generational and traditional understanding based on our varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. We hold knowledge about how to decipher bureaucracies, bosses and budgets to make strategic progress and how to connect with your colleagues to find community, collaboration, commiseration and inspiration. Putting in the work also helps our understanding of what’s at risk to the climate, to cultural heritage and minoritized communities, to enduring knowledge and evidence about human activity, if we do preservation without a foundation of core values to guide us. 

Mentorship is at the core of the communities we’ve created around digital preservation, too. For many professionals working in silos, who may be the only person in an organization with digital preservation responsibilities, communities like the NDSA and Preservation and Archiving Special InterestI Group, and conferences like this one, iPRES, DigiPres, and others, may be their only opportunity to gather support and advice from colleagues who have accomplished things they want to do at their own organizations. 

All of this means that working in digital preservation for a while puts us in a unique position to make it less terrible along the way for newer folks coming into the work. So it’s worth putting on that mentor hat.

HUMILITY

So, I’ve just told you how wise we are and now I’m asking that we be humble in that wisdom. What I mean is that we have to acknowledge that none of us, not even me, is immune to the pressures of the digital preservation problem in libraries and archives. We have all had to let go of things we wanted to achieve. The humility I’m asking for is to value new ideas while honoring foundational values. 

People working in digital preservation know what’s at stake when our stewardship is compromised. We work in a niche field with a rare and deep sense of the kinds of loss and degradation that are possible with the passage of time. Because of this, we want to be good stewards, so we figure out how to manipulate the barriers that arise in such a way that we can make progress, even if it’s a little at a time. Where humility comes in here is in making sure that, as we grow adept at navigating the restrictions and processes that have been hoisted upon us, we avoid a false reverence for those barriers.  What I’ve seen is that sometimes one can be so impressed with how well we’ve wrenched some successes out of scarcity that we get a little too proud. 

But think of the successes we’d have achieved with abundance and the freedom to apply our expertise. What if we could offer that to new professionals so they don’t have to twist themselves into knots to satisfy an overambitious strategic plan during unprecedented budget cuts. We want to break barriers down, not reinforce them so that future professionals have to toughen up in the same way we did. Doing more with less doesn’t get us more support in the end, it just drains us.

This is where advocacy comes in. I’ve mentioned the mentorship offered by professional associations and conferences, but the other part of the responsibility of those mentorship communities is to advocate on behalf of future digital preservationists so that they don’t have to fight the same battles. Many of us have seen enough compromises done to ‘get things moving forward’ to know that sometimes compromising to achieve a strategic objective turns out to be less important than agreeing to fail on a foundation of values.

To that end, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention our informal affinity group called the Digital Preservation Services Collaborative (DPSC). We are a group of digital preservation organizations united in our commitment to preserve the cultural, intellectual, scientific and academic record for current and future generations. We believe that preservation should be sustainable, affordable, practical, and available to all, and we originally came together because digital preservation is a cultural-heritage-wide challenge that is best accomplished together rather than separately. Because we provide services to many cultural heritage organizations across a variety of institution-types, our unique perspective of the landscape contributes to a deep understanding that digital preservation requirements differ broadly across units and between institutions, and that decisions are too often made for the short-term based predominantly on real or imposed resource scarcity. 

We may be best known for having published the Declaration of Shared Values in late 2018, a document which summarizes principles that reflect our core values that should be used to guide our efforts. Ultimately, we intended the Values to provide standards to which our community can hold us accountable. We have recently updated and elaborated on the set of core values that inform and direct our collective work, and they are: collaboration, affordability and sustainability, inclusiveness, technological diversity, portability/interoperability, openness and transparency, accountability, stewardship continuity, advocacy, and empowerment.

The values we set forth in the most recent draft are aspirational, not one of us has successfully implemented strategies to sustain each value to its fullest extent. We know that. What we hope is that by working towards those things together, we offer some support for staff feeling stifled or unsuccessful in their digital preservation efforts. 

I have done a lot of consulting and teaching over the past decade. In those experiences, what I hear from staff is that they are exhausted with being asked to keep doing more with less. There’s wisdom in popular teaching about doing ‘good enough’ digital preservation, for instance, when it’s right-sized to both the organization’s mission and to the content to be preserved. I’m concerned when ‘good enough’ becomes satisfying a bare minimum, one-size-fits-all approach to check a box instead of supporting digital preservation professionals who want to apply their knowledge and skill to satisfy the needs of the content and missions of both the institution where they work and profession that they chose.

I learn so much from my mentees and the folks I’ve trained and worked side-by-side with. Here’s some of what I’ve learned. Younger professionals want us to let them explore and find creative ways to do things. They want to spend more time on thoughtful appraisal and selection so that the collections they preserve are more representative of the world they see and which has been historically underserved. They want to pause on prestige acquisitions so they can eliminate the backlog… and in some cases, reassess what’s in that backlog in the first place and whether it really earns its place in their collections. They want to pump the brakes on frenzied digitization and find a better balance with born digital processing and preservation. They want archives and collections that help researchers tell a complete story, not just one of power and colonization.

It’s good to know our limitations, especially when we don’t have all the information to make good choices. For a moment, I’d like to specifically address my fellow white people. We have made up  the majority of the profession in the US since its beginnings. This means that professionals in archives and libraries have been operating with too little information from minoritized communities. This has compounded over time. One of the most important expressions of humility we owe our profession is to listen to minoritized professionals in the field and in the communities that we serve. We must keep this at the forefront of our obligation to humility. 

TDL currently has our first ACRL Diversity Resident, who we luckily hired before our government in Texas took steps to enact exclusionary practices across state institutions. Ima Oduok, TDL’s resident, is fabulous and excited. There are so many different ways to be a librarian or archivist in a variety of industries and roles. What I love about the residency model is that Ima will spend the first year and a half or so identifying what elements of her professional interests can be satisfied in different expressions of the work. We can honor her own professional goals in this way. Working with a new professional in this  residency has also helped me to remember the importance of nurturing exploration for the people I supervise. 

Part of being a competent residency coordinator for Ima is recognizing that my mentorship is inherently limited, so I’ve engaged my network to help find her mentors that work specifically in areas she’s interested in and who are more culturally-aligned with her. She’s been engaging with a Black archivist who has been one of my mentees in the past and who is also early career, and she also finds support via her cohort of other ACRL residents as well as the ALA Black Caucus, Joint Conference of Librarians of Color, and colleagues in We Here and other organizations. 

As residency coordinator, I also help Ima navigate gaps in her understanding of how particular libraries and units work, find mentors and communities that will support her along the way, and show her ways to avoid pitfalls that I’ve experienced. I’m trying to help her build connections and how to define and communicate her professional boundaries. Is that project scoped poorly for what you’re trying to achieve? Decline it. Are you being asked to do work that would take away from your other priorities? Say no and advocate for more support if that work is important to the mission. Is a curator or donor suggesting your institution acquire a digital collection that you’re unprepared to preserve? Fight it, ask for money with the donation to properly care for it over time, or highlight how it will impact and potentially disrupt your work without the proper resources.

Concluding thoughts

The future of digital preservation is upon us, and those of us with some influence should advocate for fresh and more inclusive ideas and ways of operating so that our practices are sustainable. We face challenges from artificial intelligence, social media, migrations, climate change, and never ending rapid technological evolution. I hope that I’ve offered some advice that will help us to reimagine how we empower our successors to embrace their expertise and eagerness while saying no to things that get in the way. Just like us, they will confront dwindling resources, staffing shortages, massive backlogs, and nonstop evolving technologies.  I hope I have convinced you that empowering new professionals and advocating for their expertise is not only rooted in our values, but also a strategic advantage for digital preservation. Early career librarians and archivists bring fresh perspectives, innovative ideas, and diverse skills that can enrich our field and help us overcome the challenges of preserving our digital heritage. By supporting their professional development, fostering their leadership potential, and amplifying their voices, we can create a more inclusive, collaborative, and dynamic digital preservation community. Together, we can secure a successful digital preservation future for ourselves and for generations to come. Thank you for your attention.