Welcome to the brand new NDSR-NY residents’ blog! We are Vicky Steeves, Peggy Griesinger, Shira Peltzman, Karl-Rainer Blumenthal, and Julia Kim. We’ll use this space to share updates from our project work, our personal research, and from all four corners of the ever-expanding globe of digital stewardship. Preserving digital culture becomes more challenging and more necessary by the minute, so we’re very excited to share and to hear your thoughts about some truly innovative practices, tools, and resources.

Hi! My name is Vicky (@VickySteeves), and I’m the resident at the American Museum of Natural History. I am surveying digital assets in the scientific research divisions, then writing a recommendation for digital preservation of said assets. My blog posts will deal with my time at AMNH, digital preservation for scientific data, and emerging tech that affects the field. When I’m not wandering around AMNH, I’m cuddling with my cat, Little Boss, and crafting.

This is Peggy (@peggygriesinger), the resident at the Museum of Modern Art. My project involves researching and identifying schemas, ontologies, and controlled vocabularies to describe the process history of the digitization of audiovisual materials. This will then be integrated into the museum’s new digital repository to allow for better preservation of the museum’s collections. My blog posts will detail my work at MoMA, interesting findings from my research, and my experiences at conferences and workshops. In my free time, I enjoy reading historical fiction and baking cupcakes.

Shira (@shirapeltzman) here. I’m the resident at Carnegie Hall. During my time there I’ll design workflows for the acquisition, storage, and long-term management of born-digital assets; configure and implement a new Digital Asset Management System; and create an inventory of born-digital assets. These will ultimately inform requirements for the long-term preservation and sustainability of digital objects at Carnegie Hall. In addition to project updates, I’ll blog about conferences I attend, readings germane to digital preservation, and some of the tools and strategies that I’ll be using to complete my project. When I’m not at work I’m usually hiking somewhere upstate, riding my bike, or at the movies.

Hi, everyone. I’m Karl (@landlibrarian). I’ll spend my residency designing and implementing quality assurance, preservation metadata, and archival storage practices for the web archiving program of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC). The project highlights two key aspects of digital stewardship that inspire me: the problem of defining integrity and authenticity among dynamic objects, and the leadership that multi-institutional collaborations provide on issues so complex. I’ll write about both while I’m not taking in New York’s great galleries, parks, film screenings, or just Skyping home to my cats.

Hi, I’m Julia Kim (@jy_kim29). I’ll be at NYU Libraries developing  infrastructure, policy, and workflows to make born-digital archival collections discoverable and accessible to researchers.  This encompasses both file-based material as well as material on obsolete media requiring digital forensics adaptations.  Two of the major collections that we are looking at in connection with Fales Library and Special collections are the Jeremy Blake papers and the Exit Art Archives.  My blog posts will cover my work here, conferences and workshops, and readings and related topics of interest.  When I’m not in the lab, I also enjoy obsolete audio visual media digitization with the XFR Collective.

We hope that this space will become a useful sounding board for digital preservationists and archives enthusiasts. We’ll post updates a few times every week, so check back early, often, and share your thoughts with us.