Training Professionals to Preserve Digital Heritage: The School for Scanning

From 1995 to 2005, the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) presented its School for Scanning conference eleven times in cities across the United States, serving a total of nearly four thousand professionals. The program addressed a seemingly insatiable need for training on building, managing, and preserving digital collections. Because the conference was presented by an organization whose mission is preservation, the emphasis was on standards, quality, and assuring long-term access to digital collections. Since 1995 the content of the conference has evolved as institutional digitization programs have matured and as standards and best practices have developed. The succession of conference agendas provides a series of snapshots of the effort that has gone into bringing digital programs into being. This article, originally written as a paper for the 2006 Congress of the International Federation of Library Associations [IFLA] in Seoul, Korea, looks at how the needs of the audience changed over the decade. It evaluates the factors that have contributed to the school’s ongoing success and at current challenges to this continuing education program as the experience level of professions in the field advances rapidly. Mirroring the Growth of Digital Programs On April 13, 1995, NEDCC presented the first School for Scanning as a one-day conference at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston (see Appendix 1). The program grew out of an ongoing series of preservation microfilm workshops sponsored by NEDCC. A growing number of attendees were requesting additional training on digitization because, they reported, within their institutions, they were the ones expected to staff new Training Professionals to Preserve Digital Heritage: The School for Scanning