It’s hard to believe, but the first POWRR Institute is right around the corner! We are putting the finishing touches on the modules and getting all the handouts and flash drives prepared for the big day. We will be welcoming our first crop of attendees on November 30th-December 1st at the NIU Conference Center in Naperville, Illinois. The featured guest speaker for the event will be Karl-Rainer Blumenthal, Web Archivist from the Internet Archive, who will be presenting a talk titled “Getting Started with Web Archiving.” The featured case study instructor will be Lynne M. Thomas, founding member of the Digital POWRR project and recently named Head of the Rare Books and Manuscript Library and Juanita J. and Robert E. Simpson Rare Book and Manuscript Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Institute attendees have been sent their individualized “POWRR Plans” for partial completion before the start of the Institute. These self-assessment documents will be updated over the course of the Institute as participants gain knowledge and insight from institute instruction and dialogue, and will form the basis of the individual consultations participants will have with an Institute instructor.
Attendees have also been invited to join the Digital POWRR Slack workspace, which we will be encouraging cohort members to utilize as a collaboration space after the close of the Institutes. We will be holding a virtual “Open House” for the Naperville Institute attendees on Monday, November 20th from 9-12 and 1-4 PM (CST). Members of the POWRR team will be on hand to answer questions, and chat. We also encourage non-attendees to join up and contribute your voice. If you are a member of the general digital preservation community and would like an invitation, we would welcome you! Please fill out this short form to request an invite.
In other news, we have also made some tweaks to our initial overall schedule. The second Institute will be held in conjunction with our friends at the Sustainable Heritage Network at the Washington State University campus in Pullman, Washington. We hope to have a date finalized very soon, but it looks like we will be holding the Institute during a weekend in April 2018. Applications for the second Institute will go live on November 30th and will be accepted until December 29th. Our third Institute will be held at the Arizona State University Library in Tempe, Arizona in June 2018. We will be settling on a date for this event very soon as well. Our fourth Institute will be held in conjunction with our friends from the Historically Black Colleges & Universities Library Alliance in Atlanta, Georgia in October 2018. The final POWRR Institute will be held at the George Washington University campus in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 2019. Please monitor the Institutes page here on our website for details on date selection, and to see when applications open and close. As a reminder: Institutes are are held completely FREE OF CHARGE to attendees, and scholarship money is available to offset the cost of travel to/from the events.
