Artstor is pleased to serve as a founding member of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) along with 50 other prominent organizations. As an outgrowth of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), the NDSA is headed by the Library of Congress as “a collaborative effort among government agencies, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, and businesses to preserve a distributed national digital collection for the benefit of citizens now and in the future.”

Artstor was invited to join the NDSA as the recipient of a grant through the NDIIPP program in 2007. The Library of Congress recognizes Artstor for advancing the understanding of the management of born-digital still images by encouraging its contributing photographers to use embedded metadata as a means of packaging and delivering their content. In fulfillment of the original grant, Artstor advocates the use of existing metadata structures and tools for embedding metadata and has developed an application for extracting metadata — Artstor’s Embedded Metadata Extraction Tool (EMET). EMET is an open-source software tool that will be freely available for download as a stand-alone application by December 2010. EMET will facilitate the life-cycle management of digital images and their incorporation into external databases and applications.

As a member of the NDSA, Artstor will participate in two working groups:

  • Standards and Practices: Developing, following, and promoting effective methods for selecting, organizing, preserving, and serving digital content.
  • Infrastructure: Developing and maintaining tools for curation and preservation, and providing storage, hosting, migration, or similar services for the long-term preservation of digital content.

Johanna Bauman, Senior Production Manager, will represent Artstor in the Standards and Practices working group. Continuing the work already begun as part of the NDIIPP grant, Bauman will bring her experience to bear in collaborating with the photographers and institutions who are sharing their images in the Artstor Digital Library. William Ying, Chief Information Officer, will participate in the Infrastructure working group. Ying has years of expertise overseeing and building the architecture of the Digital Library and is now spearheading the development of Shared Shelf, a web-based image management software service. Both the Artstor Digital Library and Shared Shelf are major infrastructure projects that will further enhance the ability of institutions to curate, share, and preserve digital content.

Artstor looks forward to continuing its work with the Library of Congress and the NDSA partners to advance the standards and practices of the digital preservation.