“It’s many adults’ worst nightmare: how to entertain and (try to) educate thirty 8th graders for an hour? Especially when the subject matter is as potentially complex as how to preserve digital information.
Well, the first thing to do is to try and think like the teenagers who visited the Library on May 13, 2011 from the Imagine Schools South Lake Middle School in Clermont, Fl as part of a class trip to Washington, D.C.
[See a slideshow of images from the event here.]Lucky for us this wasn’t the first time we’ve engaged with students on the subject of digital culture and its preservation. Back in the summer of 2009 we hosted a visiting group of high schoolers from Arlington, Va., a visit that provided the grist for the “Digital Natives Explore Digital Preservation” video.
The insightful video (seriously, go watch it now) explored teens’ knowledge of digital preservation in general, as well as their ideas of what digital items should be saved, who’s responsible for saving them and what the challenges are in saving them.
Since then, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library has participated in outreach events at the National Book Festival and has hosted two Personal Archiving Day events at the Library, all of which helped us understand what digital preservation issues were of concern to the general public. . .”
Read the full blog post by Butch Lazorchak over at the Library of Congress blog (June 1, 2011)