Lessons learned: DPS builds out staff training opportunities and reflects on what works

Starting a career in libraries often begins with a couple of years of formal education and internships. Then you launch onto the professional scene, where you grasp at continued professional training wherever possible – sometimes through institutional workforce development, sometimes through conferences. Continuing education opportunities are particularly vital in digital stewardship, which steadily evolves as collections have more born-digital content, new tools are developed, and the state-of-the-art advances. Over the past year, Harvard Library Digital Preservation Services (DPS) has been experimenting with offering digital stewardship training outlets for staff. Below, we reflect on our approach and recent experiences and look forward to what comes next.

Guiding principles

The DPS team has doubled since 2021, but with four people and a newly launched service supporting digital accessions, we remain a small team with plenty on our plate. Some guiding principles in assembling training and education opportunities are: 

• Not duplicating resources. If there are existing useful resources, open to the community or through our organizational memberships, we don’t want to needlessly replicate good work. We prioritize surveying and selecting community resources and complementing them with local good practice and documentation.
• Care for DPS’s capacity. Aside from not using our time to duplicate good work, we want to maintain flexibility in experimenting with training strategies instead of committing to our initial endeavors. We encourage feedback, and we strive to iterate on what works well for others, as well as what works well for our team.
• Develop opportunities for a variety of staff interests. An ideal cornucopia of educational opportunities will: upskill staff on-the-job to expand their capabilities; empower staff interested in a career shift to acquire new knowledge; and be an advocacy tool for our work, so our colleagues can engage with our team in an informed way. 

Leveraging library memberships 

One of the best perks of the organizational memberships that DPS facilitates is that they’re teeming with educational resources. The BitCurator Consortium and International Internet Preservation Coalition host a bevy of teaching materials, and the Open Preservation Foundation and Software Preservation Network host regular workshops and clinics for how to deploy the open-source tools they host.  

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) developed a series of Novice-to-Know-How (N2KH) curricula that members can ingest into their own local training platforms. DPS now offers the following DPC courses in the Harvard Training Portal, available to all staff: 

• Novice-to-Know-How: Digital Preservation for Beginners (Harvard login required)
• Novice-to-Know-How: Email Archiving (Harvard login required) 

Email Archiving Training Cohort

In 2023, Harvard Library decommissioned its homegrown email archiving tool, EAS, and shifted to supporting adoption of the open-source email archiving software, ePADD. Even before shifting to ePADD, email archiving activities had never launched programmatically across the libraries, as only a couple of units used EAS. The adoption of ePADD had many benefits, including free software, open documentation, and a community forum – but it also meant there were no formal provisions for training.  

DPS collaborated with Harvard’s digital archivists on the best approach to upskilling staff, and they suggested a cohort approach -- where they could learn together -- would be most effective. In fall 2024, DPS hosted an Email Archiving Training Cohort that consisted of: 

• DPC’s N2KH: Email Archiving curriculum
• Two half-day ePADD workshops, taught by Sally Debauche from Stanford University (which were recorded, for future asynchronous training)
• Three cohort meetings, which included panel presentations and large and small group discussions
• A shared listserv and drive for community resources like readings, recorded demos, and workflows 

19 staff members from ten library units participated, and enrollment was prioritized for staff with current responsibilities for email records, while a few spots remained for staff that anticipated future work with email. We distributed pre- and post-cohort surveys, to gauge learning styles and beneficial group dynamics, and establish a knowledge baseline that we could measure for growth. 

Based on these surveys, the cohort offered modest gains in knowledge and confidence, ranging from a 23% increase in email delivery knowledge to 82% increase in format knowledge. The training itself provided a firm foundation of knowledge, and further skill development and confidence can be gained through local application of what participants learned.

“There's only so much that anyone can get out of a demo so it's just a matter of having opportunities to put this to use where I work.” - Cohort participant

Many participants also valued the format of the cohort, but some said they would like more time talking or in-person contact.  If we offer future training cohorts, some changes we would make include: 

• Have training and demonstrations completed asynchronously and use synchronous cohort time to dissect, discuss, and workshop ideas.
• Potentially host some segments in-person, for example taking an online training and then workshopping use of the tools together.
• Incorporating use of real collections -- during the cohort, we used a single sample collection to avoid security issues if we needed to share screens, but in the future, we would opt for a sample collection to follow along in the training while workshopping an actual collection for hands-on practice. 

DPS’s newest team member, Abby Wolf, is now working with some cohort participants on using what they learned in the training to build their local workflows. Abby will also begin hosting office hours for informal questions. Local progress will then be shared back through a forthcoming community of practice, so participants can continue to connect and expand their capabilities in tandem. 

What's next?

No single DPS team member is dedicated to training and education, but it remains something our entire team is excited about, as we are able to support it. Future opportunities must be balanced with our current constraints, such as a limited budget for memberships and invited trainers.  

Some highlights that we’ll prioritize as part of our FY26 goals include: 

• Improved training documentation for the new Digital Repository System
• Adding another Harvard Training Portal curriculum from the Digital Preservation Coalition, on “Providing Access to Preserved Digital Content”
• Amplifying training and workshops from HL memberships 

Do you have other ideas for training opportunities you would like to see? Email the DPS team at digipres@HU.onmicrosoft.com!