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Where is the line between the Digital Preservation and Libraries stack exchange sites?

I keep wanting to post digital preservation questions here; I've seen that some DP related questions have already surfaced in the Q&A. For those that are not aware, there is another stack exchange proposal for "Digital Preservation" in the works. I'm a bit confused where the line is between questions appropriate to Digital Preservation and those appropriate to Libraries.

A quick look at the name tags shows there are quite a few DP folks lurking/participating already--so maybe there is a clear distinction that I'm just missing but our guru's will point out.

Just curious, is there a way for moderators to move questions from one site to another?

AaronC

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Answer by Ed Summers

I think the DP proposal should be withdrawn and we should just talk about those issues here.

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Answer by Ashley Nunn

Digital Preservation seems like it would fit as a subset of questions here - there seems to be a lot of overlap.

As for merging/migrating questions - this is a possibility - mods do have the ability to migrate questions from site to site (for example, when the Literature beta site closed, a bunch of the questions from there got moved to SciFi.SE). People with enough rep to vote to close also have the ability to suggest some migrations, but that is pretty limited. You can also flag questions and suggest they be migrated. However, I don't know how that would work for a beta proposal - I have no idea if it is something that should happen, let alone if it is even possible.

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Answer by sheepeeh

The difficulty with shifting digital preservation here comes from the proposal stage--there was some discussion about the lines of library/information science and a lot of people seemed to want the site to focus exclusively on libraries. The archives and museum communities also have a huge stake (larger, I would argue) in digital preservation, but often not so much a stake in libraries.

That said, I think DP is going to have a tough time getting the required high rep users, and if there's consensus that "information science" includes "cultural heritage" more broadly, I think it makes a lot of sense to include DP questions on the LIS SE.

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Answer by Trevor Owens

There is overlap in the Venn diagram between libraries and digital preservation but there are a lot of people working in digital preservation who are not involved with libraries at all.

  1. Science data managers
  2. Professional photographers (there are digital preservation questions on the Photo SE)
  3. Folks in various entertainment media industries (music, film)
  4. Museum professionals (which it sounds like people don't think fits here)
  5. Computer scientists and engineers working on storage media.
  6. Folks working on digital media for news organizations
  7. Anyone involved in Digital Asset Management

This is to say that there are a lot of people who work on digital preservation that do not think what they do has anything to do with libraries. While "information science" was appended to the libraries SE title, in practice, the title seems to suggest that this space is about things that happen in libraries and things that people with MILS degrees do. (In the broadest sense it would seem like "information science" could be a catch all category for a lot of different stack exchange sites.)

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Answer by jonsca

I wanted to draw everyone's attention to a recent answer given in the Discuss area of Area 51 to the following question:

Rather than focus the time to discuss a mechanical merger and figure out who is for or against, why not sate yourselves for now on what is already on-topic for Libraries? Feel the merge potential, rather than talk about it. You don't need the merger for approval to ask on the site. Might as well ask now rather than waiting for Digital Preservation to launch.

That'll be a much better judge of the appropriateness of whether the Digital Preservation community would be happy sitting in the same site. See how everyone fits with what intersection already exists, and consequently work out from there if people are happy with the current state, or if a separate site is best.

That is an answer from Grace Note one of the Community Managers here on SE.

So, please, test the waters with your DP questions on Libraries.SE! Allow your efforts to define the site and its eventual FAQ.

(any opposing viewpoints can of course weight in on our Meta here or in A51 itself)

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Answer by Paul Wheatley

So the Digital Preservation stack has finally reached 100% commitment and it's been a few months since this question has been considered. So what do we do now? Having previously sat on the fence, I'm now more in favour of going with a dedicated DP site. I think this would have the dual benefits of making it easier to expand the user base to some of the other communities mentioned above in Trevor's post, while allowing moderation and scope to be tuned more appropriately for the specific needs of a DP stack.

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