Below are the selected host projects for the NDSR-NY 2015-2016 cohort. The proposals outline goals for the residents and the specific responsibilities required by each institution’s project.

Brooklyn Academy of Music
The Archives and the Born-Digital Asset Life Cycle at the Performing Arts Institution

To survey and inventory all born-digital materials created at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and to develop workflows and best practices for assessment and ingest into the BAM Hamm Archives for long-term accessibility and preservation of materials.

Final Report, NDSR Resident Carmel Curtis

CUNY Television
Harnessing Media Micro-Services for Stewardship of Digital Assets at CUNY TV

To assess the developing state of archival procedures of the CUNY TV Library, including those that pertain to media acquisition, storage, digitization, information management, and content dissemination. To evaluate and improve the micro-services currently in service in CUNY TV’s Library. These micro-services are primarily comprised of bash scripts and defined workflows to accomplish specific tasks, such as transcoding, assessment, delivery, storage, metadata harvesting, logging, and digitization. The resident’s assessment will result in a prioritized list of advancements or adjustments to be pursued or implemented during and/or after the residency.

Final Report, NDSR Resident Dinah Handel

New York Public Radio
A Digital Preservation Roadmap for Public Media Institutions

To aid in the creation of a robust digital preservation roadmap for New York Public Radio’s digital assets.  This project will include a detailed investigation of the current landscape of the organization’s digital collections and the formulation of recommendations for long-term, institution-wide digital curation policies. The goal is to create a seamless and integrated approach that will leverage in-house resources, but also think of new and creative ways to capture the digital history and legacy of NYPR. The resident will produce an adaptable framework that will assist other public media companies in the creation of more comprehensive digital preservation strategies.

Final Report, NDSR Resident Mary Kidd

Rhizome
Born-Digital Preservation in the Rhizome ArtBase

To enable the functional preservation up to 50 born-digital, performative artworks from the ArtBase collection, in various stages of preservation or decay. To build metadata and infrastructure across the entire collection, as it migrates to an innovative Wikibase system (in conversation with the WikiMedia Foundation), and a new front-end interface. The project will, at various stages, involve pioneering or using the new methods of preservation that are constantly in development within the organization – such as cloud-based Emulation-as-a-Service and the Colloq social media archiving tool. The resident will communicate this work to peers in the preservation field in order to provide leadership to the field of born-digital art and digital preservation more broadly.

Final Report, NDSR Resident Morgan McKeehan

Wildlife Conservation Society
Piloting Workflows and Systems for Long-term Preservation of Born-digital Content from the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Education, Exhibit, and Geospatial Analysis Departments

To assemble a pilot digital archives system for the Wildlife Conservation Society [WCS] Archives, in the process revising the Archives’ policies and workflows to better manage digital content and providing recommendations for next steps going forward.  The resident will survey key staff in three WCS departments to ascertain the amount and variety of digital assets they manage, as well as their workflows for creating and using digital content.  The resident will compile the results of these surveys, information on typical researcher use cases and reference requests collected by the Archives, and the Archives’ draft specifications for a digital content repository.  Based on these three data streams, the resident will collaborate with the primary project mentor to select components that can satisfy user needs, the Archives’ limitations, and the requirements of the materials identified in the departmental surveys.

Final Report, NDSR Resident Genevieve Havemeyer-King