As of December 2025, the NDSA Leadership recommended welcoming its three most recent applicants into the membership:
Within the Bard College Libraries, the mission of the Bard College Archives is to collect, preserve, and provide access to materials that document the intellectual and social history of Bard College and its surrounding communities. They support research by students, faculty, scholars, and the public through both physical collections and a growing body of digital resources. Their digital holdings include student newspapers, oral histories, audiovisual …
As of December 2025, the NDSA Leadership recommended welcoming its three most recent applicants into the membership:
Within the Bard College Libraries, the mission of the Bard College Archives is to collect, preserve, and provide access to materials that document the intellectual and social history of Bard College and its surrounding communities. They support research by students, faculty, scholars, and the public through both physical collections and a growing body of digital resources. Their digital holdings include student newspapers, oral histories, audiovisual collections such as Poetry at Bard and the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series, as well as the Heinrich Blücher Lecture Archive and the Hannah Arendt Personal Library Marginalia Collection, all made openly accessible through its institutional repository. NDSA membership will help them ensure responsible management and long-term access to these expanding digital assets while contributing the perspective of a smaller institution engaged in meaningful digital preservation work.
Kent State University Libraries are interested in joining NDSA as a commitment to long-term digital preservation for their digital assets. Currently, they host digital collections in the institutional repository, Open Access Kent State, and in Special Collections and Archives. The areas of collecting and preserving in these digital collections include the scholarly output of faculty, students and staff, as well as primary sources and rare materials that support teaching and research programs at Kent State University. The Libraries are engaged in digitizing materials for these two platforms at higher resolutions and maintaining a homegrown LOCKSS back-up of all ingested content. In addition to its public facing platforms, they also maintain the digital records of the University and are expanding our current capabilities in this area with the goal of providing long-term access to our users.
The University of Chicago Library seeks to join NDSA as part of its commitment to ensuring the preservation and accessibility of digital scholarship, institutional knowledge, and cultural heritage. The Library has built and maintained a digital preservation repository since 2006, which safeguards more than 300 terabytes of diverse content, including born-digital special collections, research data, and digitized collections across a range of academic disciplines. By storing multiple secure copies of this data in geographically-distributed locations, requiring descriptive and technical metadata at ingest, monitoring fixity, and controlling access to restricted content, the Library demonstrates a commitment to best practices. Its work is guided by recognized standards and assessment models, including the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation and the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Rapid Assessment Model.
Each organization participates in one or more of the various interest and working groups – so keep an eye out for them on your calls, and be sure to give them a shout-out. Please join us in welcoming our new members! You can review the list of members here.
– NDSA Membership Working Group