InfoPeople's Digital Preservation webinar series

I first became aware of Infopeople couple of years ago, when I attended the CLA (California Library Association) conference and they had a great booth with quick presentations. Infopeople is “a statewide LSTA (Library Services and Technology Act) project that functions as the training arm of the California State Library.” Since then I receive regular emails about their upcoming courses, but didn’t make it to any of them. They offer free webinars and for-fee courses (online and on-ground), but even the latter costs only $75 for librarians in California.
Their free, online, four part series on Digital Preservation ended March 20. A great thing about Infopeople’s offering that they make the archive’s of past webinars available for free. Hence I could and did go through all four part of the series, viewed the slides and read the transcripts of the chats and the presentation. I didn’t view the full recording, because I didn’t feel like filling out the required registration form to access that. The PDFs and PPTs are available without registration.
I learned a lot from the series, presented by Jacob Nadal. In the first part, on “Fundamentals” I most appreciated the historical context/analogy and the extensive framework on how to think about preservation. On my own I might have been more focused on the technical aspects, but the short definition of “Digital Preservation” reminded me that it “combines policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content over time.” Then we got an expounded view on all the key words in this definition.

The second part, on “Text and Image Formats” didn’t give me that muich new information, because I have been working with digital texts and images for 20 years. The third part, on the other hand, was about “Storing and Managing Digital Collections“, which I didn’t pay as much attention all these years as I could have. Keywords I want to remember from this presentations are OAIS (Open Archival Information System), Fedora Digital repository, LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe). I was quite familiar with the contents of the fourth segment on “Audio and Video Formats“, but I got a deeper understanding of the technical aspects of these formats.
If you are novice to the topic, or you want a refresher, I strongly recommend this course. You may also want to check Infopeople’s archives of 200+ webinars on other library related topics.