The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
A colleague of mine is working on a presentation for students about Careers in Digital Preservation. Anyone want to share the skill sets that you think they should have? Or what you think the job prospects are?
Brainstorming is great. She's also hoping for some quotes from people in the field.
MGallinger
I think its a very broad question, and there is a plethora of desirable skillsets that are / would be of value.
If I may be so bold, I'd probably split the question into two groups - and class them as technical centric and context centric. My background / role is more on the technical side, and as such I can offer some suggestions (some of these bleed over into the more contextual side of things as its not a perfect split).
Infrastructure - Its one thing knowing a server from a switch, but its quite another to approach the topographic components from a preservation perspective. Anecdotally, the traditional view of IT services and preservation seems to be more along the lines of month-to-month preservation focusing mainly on bitwise preservation (hashing, replaying of bitstreams, delivery of suitable applications). I think it takes quite a conceptual shift to understand that year-to-year preservation has a much longer purview, and in principle is less focused the bitwise preservation, and more the conceptual preservation of information. This means assuring informational blocks through time, and not just binary blocks (IT based colleagues, feel free to shoot this one down!)
Database Admin / Analyst (DBA) - For me this a bread and butter role of a repository. You need to understand what your objects are, how to locate them, how to access them, how to check on them, and we're talking about large numbers of digital objects. Whilst its not a core DP role perhaps, its takes a DBA a decent amount of knowledge to understand the specific preservation based questions and functions that are needed in a DP system - a good example is the notion of managing a moving hash value (object A comes in with hash A, preservation function occurs and object is changed, resulting a new object (B) and thus in hash A and hash B relating to the same intellectual object. Anything that happens to object A must be reflected in someway with object B, and so these things are abstractly but intrinsically linked - its a small example, but an example none the less of how a traditional DBA needs some additional models to work from.
Technical Content Specialist - Someone who can tell you what is important from a technical perspective about any digital object you encounter. Needs a very diverse set of skills (arguably the most important one is good google-fu...) some comprehension of what information contained inside a digital object (primary and meta), what standards are for file / information types and how to tell if something does meet a standard, what to do with invalid digital objects, managing / recording / explaining what the holding institution knows about the digital object (e.g. does this TIF image contain GIS information in the XMP sidecar, if so, what does it point to?), a list of other technical functions that could be asked at any time to help the holding institution collect, appraise, record and store digital things (including assessing and dealing with unknown bitstreams....)
Preservation Action Specialist - Someone who is responsible for the preservation functions. Migrations, access copy generations, any emulation platform, interpretations of objects, creation of groups of objects that can be worked on together, knowing how to tell that story to content owners / guardians so they can be comfortable with any actions being undertaken, informing policy, reporting on processes, keeping informed etc etc...
Preservation Policy Specialist - Someone to handles the internal policy side of ensuring that preservation activities are properly codified, documented and aligned with other business units and they handle the theoretical / philosophical concerns and considerations of preservation management.
I put the policy role at the least technical side of the technical roles.
On the contextual side, I'd have to say its the usual library, museums and archive functions (records management, collection planning, collecting, curating, indexing, cataloging etc) but in a way that is (1) digitally savvy and (2) preservation aware.
In our SPRUCE Project Mashup events we've guided digital preservation practitioners through various steps in building a business case for new work they'd like to take on. One activity focuses on a skills gap analysis within each practitioner's organisational setup. The results of these digital preservation business case activities are captured by event here (see the links to the Glasgow and London Mashups, and then follow on to the Skills Gap Analysis sections). This data is somewhat raw (we're planning to pull it together into some more useful guidance/best practice work), but it may provide some useful pointers based on real needs in Libraries, Archives and other preserving organisations.
Summarising this quickly in order to provide some degree of answer here is difficult as the needs tend to be pretty varied. A common core skills requirement however is for basic technical skills. Running tools from the command line, scripting tools up to run over data, that kind of thing.
The other approach is to look at what jobs are being advertised in this field right now, and what skills those roles require. The code4lib jobs site and the Digital Preservation Coalition site are great places to do that.