The National Digital Stewardship Alliance was launched in July 2010 as an initiative of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. Founding NDSA members participated in an organizing workshop that determined how the NDSA would be structured and established how it would function as a collaborative, volunteer organization.

Common Challenges, Community Solutions

In creating NDIIPP, Congress charged the Library of Congress with building the capacity for public and private organizations across the United States to save digital content of current and future value to the nation. The NDSA’s initial members were drawn from the existing NDIIPP partnership network.

Values Statement

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance and all member organizations are bound as a community by the following values:

• Stewardship Members of the NDSA are committed to managing digital content for current and long-term use. The members of the NDSA are actively ensuring sustained access to the digital content that constitutes our national legacy and empowers us as leaders in the global knowledge economy. Individually, these organizations support the management of digital resources; as an Alliance, we commit to protecting our nation's cultural, scientific, scholarly, and business heritage.
• Collaboration Collaborative work is the centering value of the Alliance and a value shared by all members. Approaching digital stewardship collaboratively allows the NDSA to coordinate effort, avoid duplicate work, build a community of practice, develop new preservation strategies, flexibly respond to a changing economic landscape, build relationships and increase capacity to manage content beyond institutional boundaries.
• Inclusiveness The NDSA is a collaborative effort to preserve a distributed national digital collection for the benefit of current and future generations. We value the range of experience, the potential for innovation, and the fault-tolerance that heterogeneity brings. We believe the preservation of digital information is a pervasive challenge and that engaging across different communities strengthens the nation’s digital preservation practices and increases the likelihood of preserving content now and into the future.
• Exchange Members of the Alliance encourage the open exchange of ideas, services, and software. This leverages the commitments of each member to increase the capacity of the entire stewardship network. Participation and engagement result in innovations and benefits that can be shared by all. The Alliance is committed to transparency and all products generated or produced by the Alliance will be circulated under open licenses. .

Organization

The work of the NDSA is organized by 5 working groups and lead by an elected Coordinating Committee. The Library of Congress acts as the secretariat of NDSA and provides program support. NDSA questions? Send an email to ndsa@loc.gov.

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