About

Welcome to Digital Preservation Q&A, a place for information technologists, archivists, engineers, librarians, computer scientists, curators, web developers and others to help each other make best use of tools, techniques, processes, workflows, practices and approaches to insuring long term access to digital information. Broadly speaking, the goal of this site is to create an easy to use public knowledge base to support digital preservation.

This is a joint project of the Open Planets Foundation and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Innovation working group. In keeping with all the NDSA's work, discourse in this space should be grounded in the NDSA's values statement, which focuses on a commitment to Stewardship, Collaboration, Inclusiveness and Exchange. Along with broad participation in a range of capacities, the Open Planets Foundation generously maintains infrastructure for running this site.

Digital Preservation Q&A is currently moderated by representatives from NDSA and OPF member organizations. Questions that look like spam (things that are completely off topic) will be removed immediately. Questions that look off topic will generally be commented on with suggestions to refine them. Both questions and answers need to be respectful and helpful in tone. Moderators will delete comments, questions and answers that are interpreted as offensive, mean spirited or are not in keeping with the spirit of inclusiveness that is an underlying value of this space. Everyone who participates here should be respected as a learner. We are here together to learn from each other. If at any point there is an issue where someone feels uncomfortable with the tenor, tone or content of the site feel to either start a discussion about the issue with the tag “meta” or to contact the general NDSA email (NDSA [at] loc [dot] gov) to make the moderators aware of the issue.

Over time, similar questions will be asked. While one hopes that people will search first to see if the question has been asked before, it won’t always happen. If the content of a question is sufficiently similar to an existing question the question thread may be closed with a suggestion to continue conversation on the existing thread.