Friday, July 14, 2017

Six Priority Digital Preservation Demands

Six Priority Digital Preservation Demands. Somaya Langley. Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge. 13 July, 2017.
     Post discusses the gap between what activities need to be done as part of a digital stewardship end-to-end workflow and the maturity level of digital preservation systems. It presents a list of "my six top ‘digital preservation demands’ (aka user requirements)":
  • Integration with  other systems: A digital preservation ‘system’ is only one piece of a much larger puzzle. In the ‘digital ecosystem’  end-to-end digital stewardship workflows are of primary importance. Metadata and/or files should flow from one system to another.  
  • Standards-based:  Libraries rely on standards. "If we don’t use (or fully implement) existing standards, this means we risk mangling data, context or meaning; potentially losing or not capturing parts of the data; or just wasting a whole lot of time".
  • Error Handling: With more work and few people, we "have to be smart about how we work. This requires prioritisation." The preservation workflows need smarter systems to aid the processes, especially understanding and resolving errors from the many third-party tools. 
  • Reporting: The types of reports needed include: 
    • High-level reporting – annual reports, monthly reports, reports to managers, projections, costings etc.)
    • Collection and preservation management reporting 
    • Reporting for preservation planning purposes, based on preservation plans
  • Provenance: Support for identifying where a file has come from. This is often handled by metadata and documenting changes as Provenance Notes. The essential metadata (administrative, preservation, structural, technical) needs to be captured and retained.
  • Managing Access Rights:  We must ensure we can provide access to the content to support both the content and users in a variety of ways, particularly the new ways they want to use the content. 
"It’s imperative to keep in mind the whole purpose of preserving digital materials is to be able to access them...." Addressing these six concerns may not be easy, but we need to "make iterative improvements, one step at a time."

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