n.the management of digital objects throughout their life cycle to facilitate their long-term preservation and useLavoie and Dempsey 2004New questions are emerging, having less to do with digital preservation as a technical issue per se, and more to do with how preserving digital materials fits into the broader theme of digital stewardship. These questions surface from the view that digital preservation is not an isolated process, but instead, one component of a broad aggregation of interconnected services, policies, and stakeholders which together constitute a digital information environment.Bastian, Cloonan, and Harvey 2011, 607Broadly interpreted, digital stewardship encompasses the creation, maintenance, preservation, dissemination, and exhibition of trusted bodies of digital information for current and future use. Our current knowledge of digital stewardship still concentrates largely on the creation of durable digital objects and on their maintenance over time.Lazorchak 2011“Digital stewardship” satisfyingly brings preservation and curation together in one big, happy package, pulling in the lifecycle approach of curation along with research in digital libraries and electronic records archiving, broadening the emphasis from the e-science community on scientific data to address all digital materials, while continuing to emphasize digital preservation as a core component of action.McCurry 2014Digital stewardship encompasses all activities related to the care and management of digital objects over time. Proper digital stewardship addresses all phases of the digital object lifecycle: from digital asset conception, creation, appraisal, description, and preservation, to accessibility, reuse, and beyond.Blumenthal et al. 2016, 1Digital stewardship is the active and long-term management of digital objects towards their preservation for and unencumbered access by future generations.Mink 2016, viFor libraries and archives, digital stewardship entails building an infrastructure that keeps pace with technological innovation and is sustained by reliable funding.Langley 2019, 94If the aim is to provide long-term, sustained access to digital content, then preservation work is a necessity. To ensure that the critical steps needed for handling digital content do not slip into the gaps between disciplines, framing the management of digital content under the term digital stewardship provides a more holistic view of all the activities that need to be undertaken.Langley 2020, 215Digital stewardship brings together the concepts of both digital preservation and digital curation. . . . Digital stewardship provides a framework for long-term thinking to ensure that preserving and managing digital content for the long-term is not merely an afterthought.Blumenthal et al. 2020, 8The initial question we asked all interview participants was, “What does digital stewardship mean to you?” We intentionally used the term “digital stewardship” rather than “digital preservation” (the term used in the NDSA surveys) in order to establish a scope of discussion that included preservation within the contexts of digital archiving, digital curation, digital libraries, and other overlapping responsibilities relevant to participants working in different organizational contexts.
