The Digital Life Cycle

June 10-12, 2025
Sacramento State University Library
Sacramento, California

Conference Details

In June 2024, digital information professionals gathered to discuss the various stages of the Digital Life Cycle (DigitalNZ: http://makeit.digitalnz.org/). The answered questions such as how do any of the various stages of the Digital Life Cycle fit into everyday work or interests in born-digital and/or digitized materials? What brings excitement or concern about work done in these stages? What is being done to prepare for future challenges or opportunities? What about current professional practices should we take forward into the future and what should be left behind?

The conference was keynoted by Neel Agrawal, then Digital Projects Librarian in the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University. Prior to joining LMU, he managed the South Asia Open Archives (SAOA), a free online collection of South Asian research materials. And at the time of the conference, Neel was building the African Drumming Laws project, a digital humanities project which documents colonial laws regulating and criminalizing drumming across Africa.

In addition to his role as a librarian and archivist, Neel is an accomplished multi-percussionist, composer, and social advocate. In 2022, he was recognized by Mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, for his work in South Asian arts, education, and advocacy. Neel received the 2021 COLA Individual Artist Fellowship from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

Thank you to everyone who met in Sacramento and joined in the conversation!

Full conference program and schedule details may be found in the program located in the Google Drive BPE Slide Repository.

2024 Organizers

The Steering Committee thanks the following individuals who helped organize the conference.

Host Oraganization

Sacramento State University Library

Conference Chair

Elyse Fox, California State University, Sacramento

Program Committee

Theresa Berger (co-chair), University of Minnesota
Elyse Fox (2024 conference chair), California State University, Sacramento
Katie Hoskins, University of South Carolina
Jenny Mundy, Oregon State Archives
Kelley Rowan (co-chair), Florida International University
Aimee Saunders, Tennessee State Archives
Amber Skantz, Athens State University
Brock Stuessi, Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts
Rachel Van Unen, MIT Libraries

Local Arrangements Committee

Elyse Fox (2024 conference chair and committee co-chair), California State University, Sacramento
Lynn Sanborn, California State University, Sacramento
Maria Ramirez (co-chair), California State University, Sacramento
Emily Vickers, California State University, Sacramento
Briana Zaragoza, California State University, Sacramento

Presentations

Below is a list of presentations and session descriptions given at the 2024 BPE Conference. To view and download all available slides from this and other BPE conferences head over to our Google Drive BPE Slide Repository by following this link.

Keynote – Integrating Social Justice into Digital Projects. Neel Agrawal, Loyola Marymount University

A Backward Approach: The New Jersey State Archives’ Electronic Records Program. Tara Maharjan and Danielle Marchetti, New Jersey State Archives; Danielle Marchetti.

The importance of an electronic records program for state archives cannot be overstated. However, creating such a program can prove to be a daunting task, especially when it has been advocated for decades. The New Jersey State Archives (NJSA) was finally able to create an Electronic Records Program in 2022 after 30 years of advocacy. The process, however, was a bit backward. Tara Maharjan and Danielle Marchetti, the Electronic Records Archivists, will be discussing the challenges that NJSA had encountered while creating an electronic records program. They will also be sharing the current state of the program, including the workflow they built with Nick Connizzo, Digital Archivist and Council of State Archivists’ Consultant, to be shared with other state archives who are building their program.

A records management approach to social media preservation, an update and a question. Brian Thomas, Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

In 2022 TSLAC presented on a records management centered approach to social media archiving, focused primarily on Twitter/X. In the time since, TSLAC has established a social media preservation program and begun attempts to expand the concept into other social platform types. This expansion has led into an important conundrum facing the digital preservation community: Not all social media API/account downloads use the same structure in their data, so do we normalize harvested/preserved social media content for either preservation or access? If so, do we set a new standard platform-neutral standard or do we align with a well-structured existing platform-specific standard? After providing an update to the establishment of the TSLAC social media archive and tools developed to create it, the presenter will lead a discussion regarding the normalization question. Through discussion, the presenter hopes we can come away with concrete ideas and an agreed-upon trajectory for social media preservation. Familiarity with json as a data format is recommended as the discussion may become technical.

Approaches to Reparative Archival Practice when Engaging with Historical Data. Jamie Rogers, Florida International University.

This session provides insights and outcomes from the ongoing NEH funded project, titled “Enhancing Access and Research Possibilities through Critical Engagement with Historical Data.” This initiative focuses on a collection of open data resources derived from the papers of Dana A. Dorsey (1868 – 1940), recognized as Miami’s first Black Millionaire. These documents include warranty deeds, mortgages, legal documents, and correspondence, transcribed and analyzed to produce unstructured text, tabular data, and geospatial assets. By analyzing and interpreting the papers of Dana A. Dorsey, we foster a deeper understanding of interpersonal networks, community development, and investment within Miami’s Black community, particularly during the pre-redlining era.

This project applies the concept of “collections as data” as a reparative archival practice. By providing access to the full-text of these materials and foregrounding the people involved, we elevate the histories of marginalized individuals. This approach actively engages with historical data to rectify historical gaps and provide a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of the past.

Recognizing the need for ethical decision-making throughout this work, the presentation addresses the entire data creation process. From project planning to stakeholder involvement, data selection, and access considerations, our approach ensures that ethical considerations are integrated into each phase of the digital lifecycle. By actively engaging with historical data, the project serves as a model for ethical, inclusive, and comprehensive archival practices, contributing to a richer representation of history.

Community Developed Good Practices for Acquiring Email Archives. Sally DeBauche, Stanford University; Christina Velazquez Fidler, University of California, Berkeley.

Acquiring email presents specific challenges to collecting institutions, raising a host of technical, legal, and ethical questions. While the tools and workflows for managing email have steadily matured in recent years thanks to excellent work by archivists and records managers and the recognition of funding agencies of the importance of this area, there is still little guidance on the process of acquiring email collections in the first place. An independent group of archivists and records managers representing leading university libraries, corporate archives, and cultural heritage organizations (with members located across the US, Canada, and the UK) formed in 2021 to discuss these issues and have been compiling good practice recommendations into a guide for the benefit of other practitioners. This guide will be released as a draft in 2024 for community feedback.

This workshop will offer participants the opportunity to connect with peers and critically evaluate the draft release of the email acquisition good practice guide. The workshop will begin with an overview of the guide, its background, and a high-level summary of its recommendations. Attendees will circulate to stations based on specific sections of the guide and brainstorm what works well and what could be improved. At the end of the small group discussions, there will be a large group recap with breakout groups reporting their takeaways in a shared Google Document. Following the conference, we will share the revised report with workshop participants and encourage their continued involvement with refining, completing and disseminating the resulting “good practices” document.

Cultural Heritage Digital Repositories at the Two-Decade Mark: A Case Study and Discussion. Jim Bradley, Ball State University; Sarah Allison, California State University, Sacramento.

As our digital collections approach (or cross) twenty years of age, taking an honest appraisal of our past choices is imperative to ensuring the longevity and sustainability of our assets. Using the specific example of the Middletown Women’s History Collection (https://dmr.bsu.edu/digital/collection/MidWmnHis) and Ball State University’s Digital Media Repository (https://dmr.bsu.edu), we will explore how a specific set of past decisions and practices – based upon concerns and assumptions that are no longer relevant – now constrain both our online space and the physical archives. We will additionally discuss the current concerns and practical limitations that have shaped our route forward, and our decision-making process in navigating the known challenges and probable barriers that we anticipate encountering. The second half of the session will then open the floor for a moderated discussion amongst attendees who may offer similar experiences or specific issues related to the longevity and accessibility of their online collections.

Digital Lifecycle Management at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Laura McGuiness and Mark Offtermatt, Los Alamos National Lab.

This discussion will focus on lifecycle management for born-digital and digitized materials at the National Security Research Center (NSRC), LANL’s classified library. Due to the sensitive nature of our work at a national laboratory, LANL is a unique workplace that presents challenges which affect the digital lifecycle. For born-digital datasets, appraisal poses an obstacle to librarians and archivists who often lack the subject matter expertise to perform a reliable assessment. These datasets are generally spanning a range of file formats that must be accepted as-is, introducing concerns for long-term preservation and access. For digitized materials, there have been issues surrounding formatting and access, often related to technical requirements for protected and consolidated systems. This results in laboratory-wide difficulty abiding by recommended format standards.

Historically, NSRC’s metadata creation has been performed mostly in spreadsheets, leading to siloed and incomplete indices. In recent years, the development of a Metadata Initiative has led to increased oversight of metadata creation. In the last year, the NSRC has adopted the Dublin Core metadata standard as a means of enforcing a core set of descriptive and technical metadata elements. To aid in discoverability of experimental data, the NSRC has become engaged in creating both data structure and content standards for scientific metadata. With plans to leverage AI technologies in the future, our staff hopes to acquire an ontology management system that can maintain vocabularies in structured formats and draw connections between metadata fields.

The Digital Historian vs. The Digital Steward. Mēgan Oliver, University of Missouri, Kansas City.

This half session is an introductory dialogue meant to surface the work being done in digital libraries on ethical remediation of metadata, especially around harmful content, equitable representation, and truly being inclusive in digital curation practices. In the past several years, the good and difficult work of auditing digital collections to ensure descriptions and subject headings are accurate and sensitive, seems to have dividing lines amongst practitioners around who is in charge of this work, how it can be resourced, and the lingering ‘why us?’ refrain that is heard at conferences and in conversations. Roles, accountability, agency, and the difference (or lack thereof) between digital historians and digital stewards is the larger framework for this session.

Digitization Realization : Actuating the Digital Life Cycle at CWRU. Alyssa Pierce, Crissandra George, and Lisa Longenecker, Case Western Reserve University Kelvin Smith Library.

Join us on our digitization journey as we uncover how the digitization workflow at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) actuates the digital lifecycle and how our interdepartmental approach benefits the whole digitization program. As we have developed our digitization workflow, we have found that centering our procedures on the digital life cycle model has allowed us to approach each step of the process more holistically and helped our staff work more symbiotically. Through this case study, we will explore the selection, prioritization, processing, description, ingestion, preservation, and marketing of our digital collections, demonstrating the movement of the digital workflow across multiple library departments. Our workflow breathes life into previously obscured archival and special collections, resulting in greater engagement, access, discoverability, and longevity. From this presentation, the audience will walk away with a greater understanding on how to make the digital lifecycle a reality within their institutions. Additionally, we hope to spark a discussion about ways in which this framework can be applied to enhance the digitization workflow in a variety of contexts, including an analysis of implications, limitations, barriers to adaptations, and contextual considerations that need to be reviewed.

Insights and exploration of metrics for born digital records processing. Carol Kussmann and Lara Friedman-Shedlov, University of Minnesota Libraries.

As increasing amounts of archival material are in born digital formats, how does that change our future planning for staffing and other resources? What, if anything, do metrics tell us? The Archives and Special Collections Department of the University of Minnesota Libraries began tracking the time spent to ingest and process born digital archival materials in 2015. Following further refinements to the data collection process in 2020, we were able to accrue over three years worth of data documenting the time required for about a dozen different tasks in the workflow. Cross-referencing this time tracking data with other information about the accessions, such as size at various points in the workflow, has been instructive. This presentation will discuss observations we were (and were not) able to make based on this data, and the ways we’ve been able to use it to improve our workflow and acquire additional resources. In addition, the challenges of gathering and analyzing this type of data will be discussed. Our presentation is relevant to the conference theme as we hope that this work will contribute to our ability to manage the digital life cycle and understand the necessary resources to support it.

LoCALDig: Assessing and Addressing Digitization Readiness for a Heterogeneous Collection of Local Government Documents. Kris Kasianovitz and Kathryn Stine, UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies Library.

Now more than ever, researchers, policymakers, and the general public need access to local government information in order to make well-informed decisions about how to address the pressing issues impacting cities and counties. Being able to access, read, analyze, criticize, and debate the information published by our local governments over time is essential for creating a more equitable, inclusive, environmentally-conscious future that recognizes and uplifts diverse voices in our communities.

Libraries like the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies Library (IGSL) have been collecting local budgets, financial reports, planning documents, and more for years. In IGSL’s case, as far back as the early 1900’s. Making the thousands of volumes accessible and usable in an organized digital collection has been a long-term goal and challenge for IGSL. The collection is intershelved across multiple organization schemes, and with varying degrees of metadata coverage in both physical (a card catalog) and digital form, as migrated through several library systems.

In this presentation, we will share how we approach digital project planning, from scoping and selecting materials to assessing metadata and the digitization readiness of our collection, as well as how we are addressing questions of prioritization and handling edge cases – all within budget.

Machine learning in archives: Applying new digital methods to advance archival practices. Patrice-Andre “Max” Prud’homme, Oklahoma State University.

The Oklahoma State University Digital Archives are in a new phase of ensuring the discovery and preservation of digitized historical materials by leveraging advanced digital methods, such as facial recognition and machine learning technologies. In light of challenges, such as inconsistent descriptive metadata, ever-decreasing resources and manpower, and a dependence on fading institutional memory, the Archives seek to enhance archival asset discovery and optimize computational processes to provide access and preservation to their cultural heritage. To achieve this, Digital Archives are utilizing pre-trained models based on an open-source deep learning framework designed for face analysis and recognition.

With consideration to scalability and sustainability, the team is developing a universal model to enhance descriptive metadata, search functionality, and discovery. The computing team is coordinating parts of the workflow with the metadata team that has been working hard at cleaning, organizing, and creating or editing thousands of archival records. The objective is to augment the value and improve the searchability and visibility of digital materials, including solving unknown records to better contextualize the whole university collection of faculty, alumni, as well as buildings and more since its founding in 1890.

The presenter proposes to showcase the project flow, context, planning, design and architecture with focusing on scalability, sustainability, and ethical issues associated with facial recognition technology.

Memory Labs and Their Role in Preserving California’s Local History. Birds of a Feather. Guadalupe Martinez, California Revealed.

This session introduces Memory Labs and explores the role of library staff in their development within California’s public libraries. Memory Labs are DIY community spaces equipped with tools for hands-on preservation of analog and digital materials. Library staff are crucial in setting up workstations, implementing outreach strategies, and fostering partnerships to create sustainable programming. The session will highlight California Revealed’s support in digital preservation efforts, emphasizing the importance of preserving local history through Memory Labs and community engagement.

After the presentation, the floor will be open to all attendees to discuss their experiences or challenges with community archiving.

New Archivist at Work: Bridging Historical Gaps. Birds of a Feather. Doreen Dixon, Drake University

Archives hold the narratives that shape our understanding of the world, yet they have often excluded historically marginalized communities, leaving significant gaps in documentation and perpetuating cycles of erasure. Oral histories offer marginalized communities a means to empower themselves by contributing directly to the historical narrative. Recognizing the importance of inclusivity, the Drake University Archives and Special Collections initiated a collaborative oral history project with the university’s Black Faculty and Staff Affinity (BFSA) Group in February 2022. This project aims to document the experiences of Black alumni, and former faculty, and staff, rectifying historical oversights and promoting a more inclusive narrative.

This session will delve into various aspects of the oral history project, spanning from planning to access. It will cover tasks such as project planning, interview guideline formulation, technical support, conducting interviews, transcription, and digital file management including description and access.

After the presentation, the floor will be open to all attendees to discuss their experiences or challenges with oral history projects.

Oh We’ve Got Trouble: Serial Publications in an Electronic Age. Krista Sorenson, Wisconsin Historical Society.

Electronic serial publications continue to flourish and diversify as a format, including moving away from printed publications to online editions. However, this also poses a problem for the information professionals who have to keep up with all the content. In 2023, the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) began taking a closer look at how we collected, managed, and provided access to the growing number of PDF publications, email and Substack newsletters, blogs and websites that increasingly contribute to our serials collection and library holdings. We wondered when would we stop printing off PDFs? Would we start accepting entire runs of a publication in an electronic format? If so, how would we do that? What did all this mean for our cataloging practices? And how would we provide access to issues that no longer sat in our library stacks but in the cloud or as crawled websites?

This session shares how WHS responded to those questions, but also asks for some advice. It combines a short presentation on our workflow development for acquiring, processing, and making available electronic serial publications. Then shifts to the audience during the bulk of the session for a facilitated discussion on the challenges associated with collecting electronic serials. Hopefully by the end of the session all participants will have a better understanding of the challenges ahead and new ideas for collecting serial publications in an electronic age.

Out With the Old, In with the New: A repository migration’s impact on the digital life cycle. Katherine Dirk, University of Nevada, Reno; Rachel Jacobson, Georgetown University; Rachel Jaffe, University of California, Santa Cruz; Challen Wright, University of Nevada, Reno.

A migration of your repository platform requires you to examine all parts of the digital curation life cycle. Our presentation will examine three repository platform migrations from the University of Nevada, Reno, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Georgetown University. Each institution is at a different point in their migration process–one is in the post-migration phase, one is in an interim-migration, and the last is in the going “live” phase. We will explore the tasks that must be completed during these phases. In addition to sharing experiences, questions will be posed around the various considerations and conversations that must take place to make this work possible. Discussion questions may include: how to improve documentation; creating new metadata application profiles; collaborating with other departments; efficiently moving files and metadata into a new system; and other impacts of migration on preservation workflows.

The Road to Efficiency: Transforming Digitization and Publication Workflows. Lynne Grigsby and Chrissy Huhn, University of California, Berkeley.

We will explore the processes and methodologies underpinning digital projects at UC Berkeley Library, with a focus on enhancing access to valuable collections while ensuring their long-term preservation. Through meticulous digitization efforts, UC Berkeley Library aims to democratize knowledge dissemination by bridging accessibility gaps.

Trace the evolution of digitization workflows, highlighting strategies and technologies that have improved efficiency. From traditional methods to streamlined processes, discover real-world examples showcasing enhanced productivity and effectiveness.

Gain insight into the institutional frameworks supporting digital projects and advancements in scanning equipment, workflow optimization, and quality control. These advancements aim to bolster efficiency and accuracy in digitization workflows.

Emphasizing the critical role of metadata in facilitating discoverability and access, we’ll spotlight strategies for optimizing metadata workflows leveraging catalog data and efficient importing methodologies to facilitate discoverability and access to digitized materials.

Address preservation considerations, including the use of preservation scripts and future automation plans to enhance speed and reliability in safeguarding digitized materials.

Lastly, we’ll explore the integration of digitized materials with existing library systems and services, alongside the implementation of OAI harvesting techniques to broaden accessibility.

Service Design for Digitization: A Case (Study) Against Solutioneering. Hannah Sistrunk, Rockefeller Archive Center.

The Rockefeller Archive Center’s digitization program includes duplication services for on-demand researcher requests, strategic digitization projects for commonly accessed/requested records, and the production of images for public engagement. In 2020-2021, the institution experienced a substantial increase in digitization requests with the temporary closing of our reading rooms due to COVID-19 and reduced travel for in-person research. Faced with a large backlog of requests, we undertook a cross-program collaborative project rooted in service design methodologies with the goals of better understanding and documenting our current digitization processes, identifying existing sources of strain, and generating, assessing, and recommending ideas for process improvement. The Rockefeller Archive Center is currently working to implement many of the recommended changes, including an overhaul of our fee and billing processes, a revision of project management tracking systems, and adjustments to our surrogate file naming and storage approaches to better integrate with our systems of digital preservation and discovery.

This session is a case study of the Rockefeller Archive Center’s digitization service design project, exploring methods and tools rooted in the user experience (UX) field that archival professionals can use to understand complex problems and move toward solutions that actually address those problems.

Start Your Documentation Here!: Understanding Users and Building an Outline. Brenna Edwards, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; Hyeeyoung Kim, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

Are you feeling overwhelmed by all the documentation you should be writing? Can’t seem to find the time? Don’t know where to start? This workshop is for you!

In this double-session workshop, the speakers will share practical advice from experienced technical writers and utilize the Pomodoro Technique to help attendees to tackle the daunting task of starting your documentation. Drawing on the speakers’ background in organizing local Docuthons—a blend of Documentation and Hackathon—at the University of Texas at Austin, attendees will learn strategies for writing documentation and what pitfalls to avoid. During the workshop, attendees will also have the hands-on opportunity to identify their users and draft a clear, concise outline, laying a strong foundation for future work.

Attendees are encouraged to arrive with a documentation topic in mind, whether it is as simple as making a sandwich or as complex as preserving born-digital materials.

This Be the Beloved Curse: Learning to Love Ever-Evolving Born-Digital Description. Ruth E. Bryan and Megan Mummey, University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.

Ethical archivists make the best collection management decisions possible for preservation and access based on the repository mission and the best resources and expertise available at the time. We always mean well but are cursed to obsolescence. As technology and archival praxis change, to our successors, our choices can seem uninformed, ineffective, or even bizarre. In order to continue to be effective stewards of born-digital documents, archivists must revisit the processing decisions of predecessors at their repository. The University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) hired a full-time Digital Archivist in July 2023. This position has expanded our capacity to manage born-digital records and has also brought new perspectives, skills, and knowledge to bear on our preservation, description, and access policies, procedures, and workflows. With the availability of new tools and expertise, one area we are reexamining is born-digital description at both accessioning and full processing stages. In this session, three current SCRC archivists will offer case studies demonstrating how previous archivists described born-digital university records and personal papers in fully digital and hybrid collections; assess these approaches; and share new decision trees, tools, and procedures we are creating and implementing now. Rather than cursing our predecessors (and ourselves), we are learning to love ever-evolving born-digital description as a natural part of the digital lifecycle. (Title inspired by the title and first two stanzas of Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” from Collected Poems, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011.)

Trading Digital Spaces: Migrating DAMS. Rebecca Forbes and Victoria Haas, State Library of North Carolina.

The State Archives of North Carolina (SANC) and the State Library of North Carolina (SLNC) share their digital asset management system (DAMS) and digital collections website. From 2022 to 2023, the departments embarked on a migration beginning with system selection and ending with concrete long-term plans for metadata reinvigoration.

Presenters from both departments will discuss the transition from CONTENTdm to Quartex: our DAMS testing and selection matrix, withdrawing material from one system and transforming it to new standards, and how we tackled migrating over 1TB of material in under 6 months. DAMS migrations can be an overwhelming process, so we’ll share our challenges, tools, lessons learned, what we would do differently, and what we wish we’d known before starting the process.

Using the Digital Curation Lifecycle to Holistically Strategize an Academic Library’s Digital Staffing and Systems. Lindsey Memory and Jamie Wiser, Brigham Young University.

After a few units at Brigham Young University’s library discussed the shared difficulties of managing various types of digital content (digitized masters, born-digital special collections materials, and data), we formed a cross-divisional committee, the Digital Content Exploratory Committee. “DCEC” was charged with reviewing extant digital collections, responsibilities, workflows, and systems to make recommendations to our administration that holistically strategize this growing, still-uncharted area of library stewardship. The digital lifecycle model informed our methodology throughout the 3-phase, 2-year project. We mapped current workflows, assignments, and systems used for all content types to the lifecycle steps, and discovered gaps and inefficiencies. We conducted an environmental scan and a literature review. Wherever our committee encountered large issues that cut across multiple content types or required cross-divisional coordination, we held discussions and debate, seeking to apply what we had learned and create with durable solutions with buy-in from all members. Our resultant recommendation report guides the library in completing the full lifecycle on digital content. It ameliorates some of the inefficiencies through taskforces and policy proposals, and boldly commits the library to investing in new positions, infrastructure, and resource expenditures. The committee affirms the centrality of the digital curation lifecycle model to the library’s strategic directives. In this presentation, two committee members will describe our methodology and our results, which we hope could inform similar projects at other libraries.

The Working Group Life Cycle: A Discussion on Digital Preservation Planning by Committee. Jenna Courtade, University of Miami; Rachel Jacobson, Georgetown University; Rita Johnston, University of Miami; Kathryn Slover, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

We’ve all been there: witnessed growing momentum and enthusiasm, followed by a period of serious thought and planning, some documentation gets created, and then before there’s time to fully ingrain new workflows, a disruption happens. Four professionals from three universities will share their successes and failures with digital preservation and collection management working groups.

Rita Johnston and Jenna Courtade will discuss the recently formed Digital Preservation Working Group at the University of Miami, how the group bridges across departments and areas of expertise, and how they are working to establish workflows for processing born-digital materials. Kathryn Slover will discuss the collapse of the Digital Preservation Task Force at the University of Texas at Arlington after its initial success and her initiative to revive it in the midst of ongoing digital projects with new team members. Rachel Jacobson will discuss her experience on a Digital Content Management Working Group, which helped shed light on the need for cross-departmental collaboration around handling born-digital material and digital preservation.

The presenters aim to make this an interactive session and hope to discuss with audience members questions such as: How to bring together different stakeholders including IT, administration, traditional archivists, digitization librarians and staff? How to sustain momentum in an ever-shifting work environment? What practices do we continue and what do we leave behind?