The Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Network (DPOE-N), led by Pratt Institute in collaboration with New York University, has received a $1.28 million grant from the Mellon Foundation for expanded programming over the next four years, building on two earlier grants awarded in 2020 and 2022. The new grant will fund both online and in-person digital preservation training workshops, as well as the distribution of 177 microgrants to library, archive, and museum (LAM) professionals.
The DPOE-N began as an initiative by the Library of Congress in 2010 to equip LAM professionals across the United States with the skills and knowledge needed to engage in effective digital preservation.
Scholars and the public have long relied on physical archives to access materials to understand events and persons. Since the turn of the century, archives have increasingly become digital and their maintenance requires a new set of skills that many cultural heritage institutions have been unable to fully develop due to a lack of funding. Through recruitment and training programs, DPOE-N aims to help cultural heritage institutions across the country develop the needed capacity for storing, backing up, maintaining, and providing access to digital materials.
In 2018, DPOE-N was transferred to Pratt Institute’s School of Information and New York University’s Moving Image and Archiving Program (MIAP) for further development. Since the transition, DPOE-N has paid for cultural heritage professionals to participate in digital preservation training, and provided free workshops on a variety of topics, such as web archiving, command line tools and python for digital preservation, and anti-racist digital preservation practice.
“We are so pleased and humbled to receive this incredible grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the nation’s libraires, archives, and museums transition to preserving digital information,” said Anthony Cocciolo, dean of the School of Information and principal investigator for the grant. “The digital files created today and over the last 25 years will form the archival record of the future that scholars and the public will use to create historical narratives around all aspects of arts, science, society and culture. Now more than ever, digital information is essential to understand our world: where we have come from to inform where we are going.”
DPOE-N previously received grants from the Mellon Foundation in 2020 and 2022, enabling it to support more than 200 professionals from 39 different states and Puerto Rico with digital preservation training and provide assistance to COVID-19 impacted institutions. The funds also facilitated multi-day digital preservation workshops in Puerto Rico tailored to the unique challenges facing the island, such as the effects of extreme weather events.
The new grant allows DPOE-N to continue programming in Puerto Rico with four in-person workshops planned for the next four years. Twenty online professional development workshops covering both technical and human resource topics will also occur, and 177 microgrants will be given to LAM professionals over this period, enabling further access to digital preservation training. All DPOE-N online workshops are offered in both Spanish and English to support digital preservation in Spanish-speaking communities.
In addition to working with NYU, Pratt will also collaborate with consultants from ITHAKA S+R to develop and implement a sustainability plan for DPOE-N. DPOE-N will be supported by five graduate assistants from both Pratt’s School of Information and NYU’s MIAP program, led by DPOE-N Program Manager Kirk Mudle.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through its grants, the Foundation seeks to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.
DPOE-N’s website provides more information on the initiative, as well as a database of resources and upcoming workshops.