The National Digital Stewardship Alliance and all member organizations are bound as a community by the following values:
- Stewardship (members are committed to managing digital content for current and long-term use)
- Collaboration (collaborative work is the central value shared by all members)
- Inclusiveness (collaborative effort to preserve a distributed world digital collection for the benefit of current and future generations)
- Exchange (members encourage the open exchange of ideas, services, and software)
Stewardship
Members of the NDSA are committed to managing digital content for current and long-term use. The members of the NDSA are actively ensuring sustained access to the digital content that constitutes our national legacy and empowers us as leaders in the global knowledge economy. Individually, these organizations support the management of digital resources; as an Alliance, we commit to protecting our nation’s cultural, scientific, scholarly, and business heritage.
Collaboration
Collaborative work is the centering value of the Alliance; it is a value shared by all members and a priority in work with all organizations and associations. Approaching digital stewardship collaboratively allows the NDSA to coordinate effort, avoid duplicate work, build a community of practice, develop new preservation strategies, flexibly respond to a changing economic landscape, and build relationships to increase capacity to manage content beyond institutional boundaries.
Inclusiveness
The NDSA is a collaborative effort to preserve a distributed national digital collection for the benefit of current and future generations. We value the range of experience, the potential for innovation, and the fault-tolerance that heterogeneity brings. We believe the preservation of digital information is a pervasive challenge and that engaging across different communities strengthens the nation’s digital preservation practices and increases the likelihood of preserving content now and into the future.
Exchange
Members of the Alliance encourage the open exchange of ideas, services, and software. This leverages the commitments of each member to increase the capacity of the entire stewardship network. Participation and engagement result in innovations and benefits that can be shared by all. The Alliance is committed to transparency and all products generated or produced by the Alliance will be circulated under open licenses.
Members of the NDSA collaborate to preserve access to our national digital heritage by:
– Broadening access to our nation’s expanding digital resources;
– Developing and coordinating sustainable infrastructures for the preservation of digital content;
– Advocating standards for the stewardship of digital objects;
– Building a community of practice around the management of distributed digital collections;
– Promoting innovation;
– Facilitating cooperation between government agencies, educational institutions, non-profit organizations, and commercial entities;
– Fostering the participation of diverse communities and relationships across boundaries;
– Raising public awareness of the enduring value of digital resources and the need for active stewardship of these national resources.