On April 10-12, 2011, a diverse group of stakeholders will meet at the Reynolds Journalism Institute located at the University of Missouri School of Journalism to have a conversation about preserving news content. They’re calling it the Newspaper Archive Summit: Rescuing Orphaned and Digital Content.
More than 160 U. S. newspapers have either quit business or stopped publishing a print edition during the past three years. How can we make sure that a community’s history and cultural record does not cease to exist? How can we make sure that digital news products currently being created by online news organizations are preserved and accessible for citizens and scholars in the twenty-second century?
In 2010, a Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, created and funded by the Library of Congress, NSF, Mellon Foundation, National Archives and a few other organizations, published their final report. Some of their recommendations were:
* To convene expert communities to address the selection and preservation needs of commercially owned cultural content
* To discuss methods for providing financial and other incentives to preserve privately held cultural content in the public interest
* That stewardship organizations (libraries, museums, historical societies) should model and test mechanisms for flexible long-term public-private partnerships that foster cooperative preservation of privately held materials in the public interest
These issues will be addressed at the conference which will bring six groups of diverse stakeholders together to have a conversation about how we can create public/private partnerships and define incentives for commercial entities to hand off public interest content to stewardship organizations for preservation.
Stakeholders will include:
* Stewardship organizations (libraries, museums, digital archives)
* Print and Online News content publishers and organizations
* Experts in news copyright
* Academic and community scholars who depend on news content for their research
* Genealogy community
* Commercial vendors and content aggregators
On the first day, participants will hear stakeholder panelists talk about how it is in the public interest to preserve and provide access to news content. They’ll talk about copyright and third party vendor issues- hear from scholars and genealogists about the need for preservation and access of this content and listen to the needs and concerns of news content creators and publishers. Attendees will also hear from stewardship organizations and successful commercial and non-commercial digitization projects.
On the second day, conference goers will work together in diverse groups developing a plan for creating partnerships and incentives to preserve and provide access to analog and digital news content.
The event will be held on Monday, April 11, 2011, at the Reynolds Journalism Institute on the University of Missouri campus in Columbia, Missouri.
Visit their regularly updated conference website. Registration is free, go here to sign up.