Written by Joseph Koivisto
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The National Digital Stewardship Alliance — along with support from DuraSpace — has released their 2014 National Agenda for Digital Stewardship. In this report, the NDSA aimed to…
highlight emerging technology trends, identify gaps in digital stewardship capacity, and provide funders and decision-makers with insight into the work needed to ensure that today’s valuable digital content remains accessible useful and comprehensible in the future, supporting a thriving economy, a robust democracy, and a rich cultural heritage.
Concurrent with the ongoing trends in digital information facilitation, curation, and preservation, the agenda details important elements in digital content areas, technical infrastructure development, and a variety of research priorities. By clearly articulating its priorities, the NDSA has created an outline for future development that will guide their work and provide external organizations with insight into the new horizons of digital stewardship research and implementation.
While much of the report covers ground that has been discussed before (the diversity of digital content areas, development topics for technical infrastructure), the discussion of research priorities presents a list of fascinating regions for new study. These include…
- Applied Research for Cost Modeling and Audit Modeling
- Information Equivalence and Significance
- Policy Research on Trust Frameworks
- Preservation at Scale
- Strengthening the Evidence Base for Digital Preservation
These topics present fertile ground for future scholarly work and may be worth investigating for personal research (and maybe an article or conference presentation…).
Regardless of whether or not you intend to plunder NDSA’s agenda for personal research topics, it is an important bellwether for digital data professionals and all forms of digital scholarship.
CUA CHIM 