Contributing back to the commons in digital preservation hasn’t been for everyone.
We know the famous XKCD that touches on the underappreciated work of maintainers in obscurity. When you, or your institutions, or services are using free and open source software, or other information and data in the commons, and you’re not contributing back, you’re perpetuating this, and what’s more, there’s a virtuous cycle that we’re missing out on.
I read something the other day and it felt like a red flag.
Sometime in 2024, I received zero feedback for a job interview—one of at least five interviews without any feedback in the last eight years.
The thing is, digital preservation is very niche. Those five roles probably represent a good number of institutions actually hiring specialists and likely represent some of the best chances for jobs in the future.
Not getting a role is part and parcel of interviewing, but in not providing feedback, a didactic moment was lost—a moment of community connection and outreach—and simply an act of care.
Furthermore, loops are not closed, processes feel incomplete, and of course, you will likely know the person who gets the role ahead of you. Trying to measure yourself against that individual will likely be in the back of your mind when you next meet or work with these individuals because you have been left questioning by the recruiter.
And before it is suggested that this is just a ‘you’ thing—let’s say conservatively, five people interviewed for each of the five positions I applied for. Assuming everyone is treated equally, that’s 20 people missing out on something critical to improving their skill set, interview technique, or helping them find more suitable jobs in the future. I guarantee, you ALL deserve feedback. It is also 20 people that each recruiter has missed an active opportunity to build a stronger bond with, who will sing the praises of the process and the organization; this is important.
Back in 2017, I had an abstract accepted for a chapter in the ALCTS Monograph: Digital Preservation in Libraries: Preparing for a Sustainable Future. With my author’s copy now available, I take a look at the background and its genesis below. The complete monograph is a fascinating read with some great contributors. You can find it online at the ALA Store.
Digital preservation as-a-service (DPaaS) is a concept that could potentially allow many more users to satisfy the need to maintain ‘records’. Be those records in government, in another so-called GLAM institution, or one’s own personal memories and artefacts.
DPaaS makes sense on a number of levels as it enables the sharing of some very expensive infrastructure and individuals (storage, backup, delivery servers, software maintenance, engineers).
Those savings could be significant but I’m not aware of any single exemplar of the complete DPaaS infrastructure operating out there right now.
My instinct is that this is because one does not simply do digital preservation.
But that’s an overly dramatic simplification. I wrote up some rough notes off the back of a conversation. I take a look at these below.
Formatted 2025 for SEO and ActivityPub optimization. Original post: 28 April, 2017
