Libraries, Archives, Museums: Professional Development Resources for Public Librarians: Digital Preservation and Digitization Training Resources

Public Library Partnerships Project

The Digital Public Library of America’s Public Library Partnerships Project (PLPP), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, provides digital skills training for public librarians and connects them to other state and regional resources for digitizing, describing, and exhibiting their cultural heritage content. The Digital Public Library of America worked with state and regional Hubs Digital Commonwealth, Digital Library of Georgia, Minnesota Digital Library, Montana Memory Project, and Mountain West Digital Library to write and iterate a workshop curriculum based on documented best practices. This six-module curriculum is intended for digitization beginners."

Planning for Digitization
This module covers the advantages of digitization for your institution, the value of digitization partnerships and tips for project planning.
Selecting Content for a Digitization Project
This module covers project scope, uniqueness, physical format and quality, and previously processed or cataloged materials.
Understanding Copyright
This module covers how to identify content in the public domain, how to identify content under copyright and pursue permissions, orphan works, fair use, understanding risk and rights and access statements.
Using Metadata to Describe Digital Content
This module covers why metadata is important, basic metadata fields, using controlled vocabularies and using spreadsheets for metadata.
Digital Reformatting and File Management
This module covers scanning and conversion, file naming, file storage, master and access files and working with partners and vendors
Promoting Use of Your Digital Content
This final module covers identifying audience, media outreach, social media strategies, curated projects and measuring use

The Sustainable Heritage Network

Digital Stewardship Curriculum Page
"The Digital Stewardship Curriculum created by the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation at Washington State University is intended for cultural heritage professionals working in or with Indigenous communities starting digitization and other digital projects. The curriculum is designed to provide useful information and guidance to professionals to meet the needs of Indigenous institutions. Many of the topics are also replicable for small, non-Indigenous institutions. "
Digital Collections Stewardship Online Course
"This course series, designed specifically with the needs of small cultural institutions in mind, will guide you through the lifecycle of digital stewardship." Please note you will need to create a WebJunction account to access the course. WebJunction courses are free to all library workers and volunteers.

Alaska Digital Stewardship Intensive

In 2019, the Alaska State Library, Archive and Museum staff led an Alaska Digital Stewardship Training Intensive designed to introduce staff in small cultural institutions to all aspects of the digital stewardship lifecycle. Webinar recordings from the Alaska Digital Stewardship Intensive are available from the Alaska State Libraries, Archives & Museum Community of the Sustainable Heritage Network.

Digital Preservation Outreach & Education

The Library of Congress has developed a Digital Preservation Outreach & Education curriculum that consists of the six topics: Identify, Select, Store, Protect and Manage and Provide. The following links are to short video clips featuring Library of Congress staff sharing real life examples of how each topic is applied in their library.

General Digitization Resources

Digital Curation Center Glossary
Digital Preservation Handbook
Contents include: Digital preservation briefing, Getting started, Institutional strategies, Organizational activities, Technical solutions and tools
Digital Preservation in a Box
The National Digital Stewardship Alliance has created a useful online resource guide for digital preservation.
Digitization Guidelines and Best Practices
LYRASIS has compiled a useful list of general digitization resources covering a variety of formats, standards and guidelines.
Educopia Institute
These workshop are, "an open set of six webcasts, plus guidance briefs, slideshows, and handouts for each of six topics: Copyright, Data Organization, File Formats, Metadata, Storage, and Version Control. Each of these webcasts can stand alone, and these are not designed to be taken in a particular order. "
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"The ETD+ Virtual Workshop Series, taught by Dr. Katherine Skinner, is a set of free introductory training resources on crucial data curation and digital longevity techniques. Focusing on the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) as a mile-marker in a student’s research trajectory, it provides in-time advice to students and faculty about avoiding common digital loss scenarios for the ETD and all of its affiliated files."
Glossary
National Digital Stewardship Alliance Glossary
Guidelines for Digital Newspaper Preservation Readiness
The NEH-funded Chronicles in Preservation project has produced a set of Guidelines that explicitly differentiate between the essential and the optimal in preservation readiness activities and that document the incremental steps that institutions may take to move from the essential to the optimal level of preservation readiness for their digital newspapers.
Introduction to Digital Formats and Storage: Eight Part Series
This learning series from the Association of Moving Image Archivist features eight webinars, focusing on digital file formats, storage , and transfer workflows.
Smithsonian Institutions Archives Digitization Standards
Digitization specifications for still images, audiovisual materials, analog audiovisual media and digital audio preservation and analog video media digitization.