Data. Digital assets. Born-digital materials.

How do you determine what is valuable? What should you keep? How do you go about caring for what you value?

Everyone should have the opportunity to be proactive and intentional in ensuring future access to the information they value. But planning for the future is different from focusing on the needs of the current moment.

Our approach centers on guiding and empowering the individuals and organizations we work with to integrate the practice of caring for information assets into the creation process itself. We collaborate with clients to develop a custom strategy that makes sense for their context, provide guidance to help them put that strategy into action, and offer continued support in maintaining and evolving this strategy over time.

Services

Consulting

We provide consulting services to individuals and organizations seeking to take an intentional approach to caring for and preparing their information assets for future access.

Training

We also design, develop, and facilitate custom learning and training experiences to educate and advance the knowledge and practice of individuals and organizations on topics such as digital archives, digital preservation, and information management.

Coaching

Through our coaching services, we provide a one-on-one version of training that may include personalized guidance, professional mentorship, and targeted training activities to individuals who are seeking support in areas such as developing digital preservation programs, establishing information management practices, and designing digital archives workflows.

Project Profiles

Mapping an Artist’s Creative Process
In our collaboration with the artist Elana Mann, we sought to document and understand the multiple steps that take place during her creative process, including the various outputs that are produced along the way. From this baseline documentation and conceptualization we worked together to identify what of those digital outputs were valuable for the short, medium, and long term. These conversations and the clarity they produced provided a starting point for developing a strategy to integrate caring for valuable digital assets into Elana’s creative process. This step was also key to helping Elana shift from feeling overwhelmed by the size and scope of her digital assets, to a more grounded understanding of what information was important and worthy of caring for. From this point we could then incorporate new actions into her process that would help to ensure future access to her valuable digital materials, as part of a custom strategy fit to her specific scenario.
Client: Elana Mann
Embracing Preservation as a Core Value
As a small community-based nonprofit organization, the WYSO radio station has been creating and documenting the stories of its community members for decades. Recognizing the value of their historic collection of audiotapes of previously broadcasted programs, they started down the road of digitization to increase access, but realized that something more would be needed to ensure long-term preservation of these materials. We worked with the staff at WYSO to design and build a strategy and policy framework to establish a sustainable archives program. This activity was clearly something new and different for an organization whose primary focus is on creating and broadcasting new content. So our work started with engaging in conversations with internal and external stakeholders to craft and refine a vision, mission, and set of values for an archives program. Our discussions on the purpose and intention of an archives program influenced and impacted a parallel organization-wide strategic planning effort already underway, resulting in the adoption of Preservation as a core organizational value for WYSO. This recognition on the part of the organization’s leadership and staff, of the value of planning and taking action to preserve and ensure future access to significant digital assets is unique for a small community-based radio station and has created a solid foundation upon which a sustainable archives program can be built.
Client: WYSO

Our Story

Sam Meister is an archivist and educator based in Evanston, Illinois who has been working in and with libraries, archives, museums, galleries, artists, and nonprofit organizations for over 15 years. With Future Access For All he is seeking to expand archival thinking and practice to new contexts, to guide and support people in taking action to ensure the digital materials they are creating continue to exist for as long as they need them. He is drawn to this work because he sees the potential for people to create their own archives for their creative practices, their organizations, and their communities. Previously, Sam served as the Preservation Communities Manager at the Educopia Institute, and before that as the Digital Archivist at the University of Montana. He received his M.L.I.S from San Jose State University, and B.A. in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego.