Five Organizational Stages for Digital Preservation

The Five Organizational Stages of Digital Preservation. Anne R. Kenney & Nancy Y. McGovern. "Digital Libraries: A Vision for the 21st Century..." 2003.
     I have been re-reading this interesting paper in preparation for an upcoming presentation, and realize the great information in it and the opportunity to reflect on where we are and where we are going. Some notes and quotes that I really like:

• The world is becoming increasingly dependent on digital information.... Despite the increasing evidence documenting the fragility and ubiquity of digital content, cultural repositories have been slow to respond to the need to safeguard digital heritage materials.
• Of all the preservation challenges facing us, none is more pressing than developing workable solutions to digital preservation.
• The reason for the lag in institutional response to the problem "lies in the fact that most of the attention given to digital preservation has focused on technology as both the root of the problem and the basis for the solution."
• The technological methods "that reduce things to on or off status— either you have a solution or you do not. This either/or assessment gives little consideration to the effort required to reach the on stage, to a phased approach for reaching the on stage, or to differences in institutional settings. Nor does it take into account that a partial program at one institution may represent a fully mature program at another."
• The goal of digital preservation is to maintain the ability to display, retrieve, and use digital material in the face of rapidly changing technological and organizational infrastructures. Unfortunately, there is no single best way to do just that, nor is there agreement on long-term solutions.
• In this paper, we describe five definable stages that cultural repositories will pass through on their way to developing a fully mature digital preservation program. 
• Each of these stages is clearly delineated, characterized by key attributes and organizational responses. Some of the stages may be shortened, and an institution may be further advanced in one aspect over another, but they must all be passed through and in the same sequence.

• The Five Organizational Stages:  The five stages of organizational response to digital preservation are:

1. Acknowledge: Understanding that digital preservation is a local concern;
2. Act: Initiating digital preservation projects;
3. Consolidate: Seguing from projects to programs;
4. Institutionalize: Incorporating the larger environment; and
5. Externalize: Embracing inter-institutional collaboration and dependency.

• Perhaps the most immediately valuable contribution of the Trusted Digital Repository report is the framework of TDR attributes. The six attributes of the TDR framework are: administrative responsibility, organizational viability, financial sustainability, technological and procedural suitability, system security, and procedural accountability. 
• The report defines the characteristics of each attribute that together address core legal, economic, technical, and other organizational issues, and break what is often presented as the monolithic digital preservation problem into manageable parts. 
• A notable feature is that technology is not the central focus or first consideration in the framework.
• Organizational stages for digital preservation have the potential to provide a more effective communication tool, to define a metric for quantifying progress towards a comprehensive digital preservation program, and to establish benchmarks for setting organizational goals.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Researchers Open Repository for ‘Dark Data’

Researchers Open Repository for ‘Dark Data’. Mary Ellen McIntire. Chronicle of Higher Education.  July 22, 2015.
     Researchers working to create a one-stop shop to retain data sets after the papers they were produced for are published. The DataBridge project will attempt to expand the life cycle of so-called dark data by creating an archive for data sets and metadata, and will group them into clusters of information to make relevant data easier to find. They can then be reused, re-purposed, and then be reused by others to further science. A key aspect of the project will be to allow researchers to make connections pull in other data of a similar nature.

The researchers want to also include archives of social-media posts by creating algorithms to sort through tweets for researchers studying the role of social media. This could save people time who may otherwise spend a lot of time cleaning their data reinventing the wheel. The project could serve as a model for libraries at research institutions that are looking to better track data in line with federal requirements and extend researchers’ “trusted network” of colleagues with whom they share data.

Related posts:

• Data Archives and Digital Preservation
• Plan for Increasing Access to Scientific Publications and Digital Scientific Data
• Incentives and Motivations for Sharing Research Data, a researcher's perspective
• Five steps to decide what data to keep
• The Dataverse Network
• New policy recommendations on open access to research data

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation 101, or, How to Keep Bits for Centuries

Digital Preservation 101, or, How to Keep Bits for Centuries. Julie C. Swierczek. scholar.harvard.edu website. June 4, 2015.
An interesting presentation that looks at what digital archivists need to preserve electronic records permanently. It discusses:

• OAIS model for long-term digital preservation;
• requirements of a trustworthy digital repository;
• preferred file formats for long-term storage; 
• digital forensics and FRED machines;
• definitions and differences of “archives” and “backup copies”.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Data Archives and Digital Preservation

Data Archives and Digital Preservation. Council of European Social Science Data Archives. June 1, 2015.
Data Archives and Digital Preservation Data archives play a central role in research. Data is considered “the new gold”. There is increasing pressure on researchers to manage, archive, and share their datadata archives. It is important to securely store research data, and to allow researchers to reuse data in their own analyses or teaching.

Archives are much more than just a storage facility; they actively curate and preserve research data. They must have suitable strategies, policies, and procedures to maintain the usability, understandability and authenticity of the data. There are also numerous requirements from users, data producers, and funders. In the social science research data preservation and sharing, archives have the added responsibility of protecting the human subjects of the research.

The CESSDA site has many resources. Some of these are:

• What is digital preservation 
• OAIS 
• Data appraisal and ingest 
• Documentation and metadata 
• Access and reuse 
• Trusted digital repositories: audit and certification.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation Coalition publishes ‘OAIS Introductory Guide (2nd Edition)’ Technology Watch Report

Digital Preservation Coalition publishes ‘OAIS Introductory Guide (2nd Edition)’ Technology Watch Report. Brian Lavoie.  Digital Preservation Coalition. Watch Report. October, 2014. [PDF]

The report describes the OAIS, its core principles and functional elements, as well as the information model which support long-term preservation, access and understandability of data. The OAIS reference model was approved in 2002 and revised and updated in 2012. Perhaps “the most important achievement of the OAIS is that it has become almost universally accepted as the lingua franca of digital preservation”.

The central concept in the reference model is that of an open archival information system. An OAIS-type archive must meet a set of six minimum responsibilities to do with the ingest, preservation, and dissemination of archived materials: Ingest, Archival Storage, Data Management, Preservation Planning, Access, and Administration. There are also Common Services, which consist of basic computing and networking resources.

An OAIS-type archive references three types of entities: Management, Producer, and Consumer, which includes the Designated Community: consumers expected to independently understand the archived information in the form in which it is preserved and made available by the OAIS. This is a  framework to encourage dialogue and collaboration among participants in standards-building activities, as well as identifying areas most likely to benefit from standards development.

An OAIS-type archive is expected to:

• Negotiate for and accept appropriate information from information producers;
• Obtain sufficient control of the information in order to meet long-term preservation objectives;
• Determine the scope of the archive’s user community;
• Ensure the preserved information is independently understandable to the user community
• Follow documented policies and procedures to ensure the information is preserved against all reasonable contingencies
• Make the preserved information available to the user community, and enable dissemination of authenticated

An OAIS should be committed to making the contents of its archival store available to its intended user community, through access mechanisms and services which support users’ needs and requirements. Such requirements may include preferred medium, access channels, and any access restrictions should be clearly documented.

 The OAIS information model is built around the concept of an information package, which includes: the Submission Information Package, the Archival Information Package, and the Dissemination Information Package. Preservation requires metadata to support and document the OAIS’s preservation processes, called Preservation Description Information, which ‘is specifically focused on describing the past and present states of the Content Information, ensuring that it is uniquely identifiable, and ensuring it has not been unknowingly altered’. The information consists of:

• Reference Information (identifiers)
• Context Information (describes relationships among information and objects)
• Provenance Information (history of the content over time)
• Fixity Information (verifying authenticity)
• Access Rights Information (conditions or restrictions)

OAIS is a model and not an implementation. It does not address system architectures, storage or processing technologies, database design, computing platforms, or other technical details of setting up a functioning archival system. But it has been used as a foundation or starting point. Efforts, such as TRAC, have been made to put the attributes of a trusted digital archive into a ‘checklist’ that could be used to support a certification process. PREMIS is a preservation metadata initiative that has emerged as the de facto standard. METS, and XML based  document form, has become widely used for encoding OAIS archival information packages.

The ‘OAIS reference model provides a solid theoretical basis for digital preservation efforts, though theory and practice can sometimes have an uneasy fit.’

Digital Preservation Matters.

GPO Prepares To Become First Federal Agency Named As Trustworthy Digital Repository For Government Information

GPO Prepares To Become First Federal Agency Named As Trustworthy Digital Repository For Government Information. U.S. Government Publishing Office. Press Release. December 18, 2014.
The GPO is preparing to become the first Federal agency to be named as a Trustworthy Digital Repository for Government information through certification under ISO 16363, which defines a recommended practice for assessing the trustworthiness of digital repositories. The Audit and Certification checklist will be used by an accredited outside organization. This would be the first Federal agency to be certified.

To begin the audit process, GPO will be one of 5 institutions to receive a resident through the National Digital Stewardship Residency program to work for one year on preparation for the audit and certification of FDsys as an ISO 16363 Trustworthy Digital Repository.

The GPO has also recently changed its name to the Government Publishing Office.

Digital Preservation Matters.

ARMA 2014: The Convergence of Records Management and Digital Preservation

ARMA 2014: The Convergence of Records Management and Digital Preservation. Howard Loos, Chris Erickson. October 2014. [PDF]
Presentation on records management and digital preservation given at the ARMA 2014 conference.
Notes:

• Records Management mission: To assist departments in fulfilling their responsibility to identify and manage records and information in accordance with legal, regulatory, and operational requirements
• RIM Life Cycle to DP Life Cycle
• Challenges and successful approaches
• Storing records permanently with M-Discs
• Introduction to Digital Preservation, challenges, format sustainability, media obsolescence, metadata, organizational challenges,
• Life of digital media
• Best practices and processes
• OAIS model
• Rosetta Digital Preservation System
• Library of Congress Digital Preservation Outreach & Education (DPOE) Network

Digital Preservation Matters.

Sustaining Our Digital Future Institutional Strategies for Digital Content

Sustaining Our Digital Future: Institutional Strategies for Digital Content. Nancy L Maron, Jason Yun and Sarah Pickle. Strategic Content Alliance. January 29, 2013. (PDF, 91 pp.)
The shift with digital media in scholarly communications is transformative; data sets, dynamic digital resources, websites, digital collections,  crowd sourced or born digital content: there are challenges and opportunities, along with questions about who is responsible for maintaining them, and how to maximize the value of the content.

Some findings:

• project have received support from the host institution, but few have plans for ongoing support.
• There are potential partners on campus, but project leaders do not seek them early
  enough when critical decisions are being made.
• Digital projects across campuses may be hosted by many groups, which poses challenges for discovery. There is often no single place for users to find digital projects and some projects can too easily slip from view.
• Current funding styles do not support ongoing operation
• „Campus-wide solutions are beginning to emerge, but even these tend to address just the basic “maintenance” issues of storage, preservation and access.
• „Focus is often on creating new content, with little thought about ongoing efforts to enhance the content or update user interfaces.

Recommendations:

•  Perform an early and honest appraisal to find which projects are likely to require support after completion:
1. Digital content requiring just “maintenance”: plan that the content will be deposited and integrated into some other site, database, or repository.
2. „Digital resources requiring ongoing growth and investment: These require early sustainability planning, including identifying institutional or other partners and careful consideration of the full range of costs and activities needed to keep the resource vibrant.
•  Be realistic in assessing the future needs of the resource at its outset and in continuing support.
•  „Identify campus partners early on.
•  „Consider how central your project is to the overall mission of the institution.
• „Consider if projects could be drawn together to create a deeper network of support, both for “maintenance” projects and those with the potential to really grow.
• Develop ways to help users find decentralized content and to reach out to content users. These could start as an inventory of all of the digital holdings or common catalogs.
• „Determine where scale solutions pay off, where experts are best placed to champion a project, or create common storage, usage and preservation systems for an organization.
• Continue to identify and support ongoing development of the “front-end”, including user needs, interface development, and content enhancement. Pay attention to the changing needs of users and determine what enhancements the digital resource will require.

Libraries, museums, technology departments, and digital humanities centres are among the players that have begun to emerge as potential leaders of greater coordinated digital support on university campuses. Libraries have begun to consider the support of digital resources to be a critical part of their missions. Some universities provide advisory support to project leaders and libraries provide help for digital projects, from help to understand grant requirements, co-developing projects, providing hosting, curation, and preservation expertise.

 Sustainability and Use: 

•  Research data platforms: At some institutions major initiatives are underway to develop research data platforms. The goal of the platform is not just preservation and storage but access and reuse. The first step is to have a platform. From there they can test and refine the service for researchers depositing data sets, library  curated collections, and university departments.

• "A coherent digital policy from early review, guidelines on costings and deposit standards, to forecasting what ongoing activities will be needed and who will carry them out, would ideally remove much of the risk of “digital time bombs” while obliging both project leaders and university leaders to take a moment to envision the ongoing impact they want these resources to have, and how to best achieve that."

• Unlike universities (who often play the role of reluctant, passive, or simply unaware host, to a great deal of digital content created by their scholars) museums and libraries tend to be the ones initiating this work and are eager to build and maintain these collections.

• Despite the benefits of centralisation, the mere presence of a catalogue and centralised
  repository does not ensure greater usage of or engagement with its holdings.

• Many institutions devote considerable attention to the upfront creation of content, but not nearly as much to its ongoing enhancement or reuse, resulting in collections that are certainly present in the main catalogue, but otherwise exist only as capsules of content, frozen in time.

•  Once the project is finished, management of the digital resource is not always clear.

Digital Preservation Matters.

OAIS / TDR presentation at FDLP.

OAIS / TDR presentation at FDLP.  James A. Jacobs. Federal Depository Library Conference. Free Government Information. October 2011. [PDF]
A presentation giving an introduction to the "Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System" (OAIS) and the "Audit And Certification Of Trustworthy Digital Repositories" (TDR).  This includes slides with speaker notes and a nice handout about related information with links. Every library decision should assess the impact of digital issues.  Notes:

OAIS
1. It defines the functional concepts of a long-term archive with consistent, unambiguous terminology.
2. It gives us a functional framework for designing archives, and a functional model.
3. It gives us a standard for “conformance.”
4. It is a “Reference Model” that describes functions; it is not an “implementation”
5. Some key OAIS concepts are:
   - Designated Community: An identified group of potential Consumers who should
      be able to understand a particular set of information.
   - Description of roles and functions in the information life cycle.
   - The Long Term: Long enough for there to be concern about changing technologies,
      new media and data formats, and a changing user community.
   - Preserved content must be usable according to the designated community

TDR
Documents what is being done and how well it is being done.
Provides 109 “metrics” for measuring conformance to OAIS in three areas: 
1. Organizational Infrastructure
2. Sustainability and succession plan
3. Digital Object Management
4. Technical Infrastructure And Security Risk Management