The NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation (LODP) Working Group is pleased to release a draft of the Environmental Sustainability Guide for public comment. The guide is a new supplemental LODP resource that helps organizations embed environmental sustainability into digital preservation decision-making when using the LODP to measure and guide digital preservation strategy. The guide addresses feedback from the August 2023 LODP open office session, builds on over three decades of environmental sustainability scholarship and practice in the field of cultural memory and heritage, and complements decades of scholarship, guidance, and standards that promote sustainable digital preservation.
The public comment period runs from October 7 through November 30. Please provide comments directly in the above-linked Google document (full URL provided below as well), but please refrain from adding in-line edits so that we can maintain a clean document for everyone throughout the public comment period.
The LODP Working Group will present on the revision and host discussion sessions at the NDSA Digital Preservation and iPRES conferences, and you can bring your feedback to those venues as well. The NDSA DigiPres presentation is on October 9 from 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm EDT in Track 3A: Sustainability and the discussion session is on October 10 from noon to 1 pm EDT in the Lunch Sessions. The iPRES presentation is a virtual birds of a feather discussion session on November 6 from 10:45 am to noon NZDT.
Timeline: The LODP Working Group will review feedback starting in December 2025 and publish a final version along with updated versions of existing LODP resources in March 2026.
URL for the Environmental Sustainability Guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QqSznpgEtZOs2ODQqqA1WBuhCx5Qx9xIgPjq71BR4v0/edit?usp=sharing.
For more information on the NDSA LODP, see https://ndsa.org/groups/levels-of-preservation/.
Elizabeth La Beaud
On behalf of the NDSA LODP Working Group
Elizabeth La Beaud (co-chair), University of Southern Mississippi and Mississippi Digital Library
Keith Pendergrass (co-chair), Harvard Business School
Edith Halvarsson, The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Sophia van Hoek, Municipality of The Hague
Sibyl Schaefer, University of California, San Diego
Dina Sokolova, Columbia University