Digital Preservation Education: Educating or Networking?

Digital preservation training, especially continuing education, is now recognized as an essential component of an archivist's education. This paper reports on a research project that evaluated the effectiveness of continuing education experiences for increasing participants' skills in digital preservation and their ability to implement these skills in their repositories. The research project studied the impact of four workshops and five seminars in an international setting sponsored by the Electronic Resource Preservation and Access Network (ERPANET). The study findings indicate that the participants viewed the training events as successful, but that very few participants were able to implement the skills once they returned to their work environments. This paper analyzes the effectiveness of these kinds of training events and looks carefully at how they can be realistically measured.