The NDSA has established five Working Groups focusing on the following areas of digital preservation:

• Content: Focusing on the selection, discovery and preservation of digital content. For example, the group members are prototyping a preservation plug-in to enable content creators to opt-in to preservation and conducting surveys around US web archiving practices.




• Standards and Practices: Promoting effective methods for digital content selection, organization, preservation and access. Current activities include, work to enhance coverage information and resources on born digital preservation concerns and criteria in Wikipedia.




• Infrastructure: Working to identify and share emerging practices around the development and maintenance of tools and systems for curation and preservation. For example, the infrastructure working group is studying and reporting on member approaches to design and operation of large scale storage systems. Other work includes, investigating decision modeling for implementing open-source digital preservation software.



• Innovation: Working to encourage and share innovative methods of digital preservation practices and technologies. For example, the innovation group highlights innovative projects and practitioners through a series of published interviews on The Signal. The group is also developing an award program to recognize groundbreaking work in digital stewardship.



• Outreach: Building relationships with stakeholder communities and preparing and sharing digital preservation information resources. For example, The NDSA outreach working group is collecting stories of personal, professional and institutional data loss as both an opportunity to help communicate the urgency and of digital preservation.

NDSA members commit to having participants in one or more Working Groups. Working Groups identify tasks and develop work plans that will be accomplished by participants.

Each Working Group is led by a pair of co-chairs that commit to promoting the tasks of the working group that have been identified by participants. One co-chair is from a member organization, the second co-chair is a representative from the Library of Congress.

Questions about what working group you should join? Send an email to ndsa@loc.gov.

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