Number 143 September/October 2021
ISSN 1944-7639 (online version)
Contents
Follow the DLF Forum and Associated Events
Mellon Foundation Awards CLIR $1.2 Million Operating Grant
Affiliate Spotlight
Recordings at Risk Applicant Webinar Recording Available
Visit our CLIR+DLF Job Board
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Follow the DLF Forum and Associated Events
The three-day 2021 Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum kicks off November 1, followed by NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2021: Embracing Digitality (November 4), and Learn@DLF (November 8–10). If you were unable to register for this year’s virtual events, there are still ways to check in with the #DLFvillage. During the events, join the conversation on Twitter with our official conference hashtags: #DLFforum, #DigiPres21, and #LearnAtDLF.
Recordings of most of this year’s presentations will be made publicly available in the months ahead. Subscribe to the CLIR/DLF and NDSA YouTube channels to be among the first to know when we release the videos. We’ll also be posting blogs from our 2021 DLF Forum Community Journalists in the weeks following the Forum!
Mellon Foundation Awards CLIR $1.2 Million Operating Grant
CLIR has received a 24-month, $1.2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support general operations starting October 2021. The grant provides funds for core administrative and management staff that support the broad range of CLIR’s programmatic activity.
Over this period, CLIR will expand its work to build communities of practice, fund practical strategies and systemic thinking for new challenges, and promote the development of ethical policies that encourage the representation of all people in the accessible human record.
“We are deeply grateful to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for providing this vital operational support,” said CLIR Board Chair Buhle Mbambo-Thata. “The next two years will be a pivotal period for CLIR as we initiate some important new projects and bring others to fruition.”
“CLIR’s work is critical as we navigate the ongoing pandemic and its disruptive effects on our working environment, as well as the enormous implications of the climate crisis for our cultural legacy and social stability,” said CLIR President Charles Henry. “We will continue to enhance our programs in service to strengthening communication, infrastructure, policies, and practices for our constituencies as these crises evolve, while at the same time recognizing that it now falls to us to help compose a different future.”
Affiliate Spotlight
In this edition, we’re pleased to highlight activity of CLIR affiliates. Affiliates are organizations whose missions are aligned with CLIR’s, but which are not independent legal entities. CLIR serves as a fiscal or administrative host for these organizations, which retain their own governance and mission.
CLIR Welcomes New Affiliate SCTA
The Scholastic Commentaries and Texts Archive (SCTA) has become CLIR’s newest affiliate. The SCTA is an open community and a web service that aims to connect and freely distribute the intellectual history of the scholastic tradition that has been fragmented by traditional publishing workflows. The community adopts, develops, and publishes standards for semantically encoding texts to enable their aggregation and organization. The aggregated data is then offered as a service to the community.
IIPC Launches Project to Collect Afghan Internet Content
In October, the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Content Development Group (CDG) initiated a thematic website collection, “Afghanistan regime change (2021) and the international response,” and is soliciting contributions through a call for nominations.
Amidst Afghanistan’s worsening conflict and humanitarian crisis, the country’s cultural heritage is also under threat, prompting a range of responses from the global library and archive community, including several that focus on collecting at-risk Afghan internet content. Since taking power in August, the Taliban has cut internet connections in Panjshir and is asserting greater control over content, fueling concern that it could further limit access. There is also worry that foreign internet service providers could turn off cloud servers and social media platforms if sanctions are imposed on the country.
The CDG seeks to complement efforts being led by other institutions, such as the University of California, Berkeley; Internet Archive; Library of Congress; and Arquivo.pt. The CDG collection will document transnational involvement and worldwide interest in the process of regime change, recording how the situation evolves over time. The collection encompasses subtopics ranging from military experience in Afghanistan and think tank analysis to human rights and international relief efforts, as well as transnational websites and social media about Afghanistan from any country and in any language.
Nicola Bingham, lead curator of web archiving at the British Library and CDG co-chair, is leading the new collection. According to Bingham “The aim of any CDG collection is to reflect multiple viewpoints and to preserve a snapshot of society as it was at the time of archiving. It will be important to researchers that websites from across the spectrum of all human activity are collected in order to present a more accurate picture of the times.”
Since 2015, IIPC members have been collaborating to build public, transnational web archive collections based on themes or events. There are nine collections to date; the largest is the Covid-19 collection.
NDSA Appoints New Coordinating Committee Members, Seeks Web Archiving Survey Working Group Volunteers, and More
October has been a busy month for NDSA, with election of new Coordinating Committee members and planning for a 2022 Web Archiving Survey, as well as preparations for NDSA Digital Preservation 2021: Embracing Digitality November 4 (see first story).
NDSA’s newly elected Coordinating Committee members are Stacey Erdman, digital preservation and curation officer at Arizona State University; Jen Mitcham, head of good practice and standards at the Digital Preservation Coalition; and Hannah Wang, Educopia Institute staff member who serves as community facilitator for the MetaArchive Cooperative and project manager for the BitCuratorEdu project. Coordinating Committee members serve three-year terms and work with the chairs of interest and working groups on strategic goals of the NDSA.
NDSA’s Web Archiving Survey Working Group plans to conduct a survey of organizations in the United States and beyond that are actively involved in, or interested in starting, programs to archive content from the Web. This survey, to be published in 2022, will build on previous iterations of the Web Archiving in the United States surveys, published in 2017, 2016, 2013, and 2011. Web Archiving Survey Working Group co-chairs Zakiya Collier and Samantha Abrams are currently seeking three or four additional Working Group volunteers to review previous surveys and design a new survey, publish the survey and collect responses, review the responses and write the report, and present results and work at upcoming conferences. Volunteers should represent a range of institutions, types, and locations; the Working Group seeks to include one student (or a recent graduate) working toward their master’s degree in library and information studies. It is estimated that joining the Web Archiving Survey Working Group will be a nine-month commitment (4-5 hours of work per month), with work beginning in December 2021. Those interested in serving should complete this form by Friday, November 12. Co-chairs will review the responses and reach out with next steps soon thereafter.
Keep an eye out for news about the completed Fixity Survey, the opening of the 2021 Staffing Survey, and results of the Membership Survey.
IIIF Gears up for Fall Working Meeting; Register Now!
There is still time to register for the annual International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Fall Working Meeting, to be held virtually Nov. 16–18. The meeting is free and open to all. This year’s meeting will focus on three topics:
- November 16: How do we keep IIIF current?
- November 17: Demonstrating value with IIIF
- November 18: How do we reach the right people with IIIF?
Working sessions will be covered in two parts: they will begin with presentations on current issues related to the topic, ensuring attendees have a shared understanding of the issue being discussed. Following these presentations, the facilitators will host discussion sessions aimed at building community-supported solutions to those issues. In addition to working sessions, which are facilitated by community members, the event will include lightning talks focusing on related IIIF topics.
Participants who cannot attend the live sessions are welcome to attend asynchronously. All presentations will be recorded and made available following the day’s sessions, and a notes document will be provided for participants to add comments. Registration closes Tuesday, November 9, at 6:00 pm ET.
The IIIF Consortium is a community of the world’s leading research libraries and image repositories that is working to collaboratively produce an interoperable technology and community framework for image delivery.
Weave Appoints New Editors
In October, Weave: Journal of Library User Experience, welcomed two new editors. Berika Williams joined the Scholarly Submissions team as assistant editor. She is emerging technologies and web librarian at Tufts University, where she specializes in content strategy, IA, and UX research. Jean Thrift is Weave’s new Dialog Box editor. She is the user experience librarian at Lander University in Greenwood, South Carolina, where her focus is on improving the UX across touch points, including usability testing, card sorting, and other research methods, as well as instruction, advising, collection development, and reference.
Other CLIR affiliates are code{4}lib, ILiADS, and Open Repositories. Stay tuned for more updates in forthcoming issues!
Recordings at Risk Applicant Webinar Recording Available
If you’re planning to submit a proposal for Recordings at Risk but missed the applicant webinar October 6, a recording of the webinar is now available. Applications are due December 15, 2021. Grants support the preservation of rare and unique audio, audiovisual, and other time-based media of high scholarly value through digital reformatting.
Visit our CLIR+DLF Job Board
Looking for a new job? Want to advertise a position? Visit our CLIR+DLF Job Board to see new listings, and sign up for our jobs digest email list to receive a weekly roundup of job announcements. Postings are free for CLIR sponsor and DLF member institutions, and $200 for non-members. All listings receive customized promotion online.
