Published: June 15, 2016 by Anna Maloney

Each year, the Library of Congress, Office of National and International Outreach, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services partners with host sites to sponsor the National Digital Stewardship Residency. The NDSR is designed to “provide a robust, hands-on learning experience to complement graduate-level training and education” (Library of Congress). Residents attend an immersive digital preservation workshop before being partnered with a host institution to work on digital stewardship projects. The program is open to recent graduates of graduate and doctoral programs related to libraries, archives, and museums.

A culminating experience of the 2015-2016 NDSR Washington D.C. cohort is their symposium “Digital Frenemies: Closing the Gap in Born-Digital and Made-Digital Curation.” This theme was selected after the group “observed trends in digital stewardship that divide field expertise into ‘made digital’ and ‘born digital’” (Aschenfelder, 21 April 2016). Symposium speakers presented on topics that help to enforce the idea that “the future will be largely defined by the symbiotic relationships between content creation and format migration.” Similarly, the MARA program curriculum blends archives management and records management, fostering professionals with a lifecycle view of records, instead of a segregated understanding.