Measure for Measure: Tracking Effort in Born Digital Processing

Measure for Measure: Tracking Effort in Born Digital  Processing. Erika Farr. CurateGear 2015. January 7, 2015.
     Presentation at CurateGear on measuring and tracking efforts. The percent of effort for each task was helpful. Some notes from the slides:

FY2014 Metrics Gathering

• Three Digital Archives staff members processing born digital collections
• Established categories for measuring effort
• Obtain Data, Virus Check
• Ingest
• Appraisal and Developing Processing Plan
• Collection Processing (Arrangement and Description, Privacy and Restrictions)
• Prepare for Access 
• Used Redbooth for business collaboration tool

Processing Metrics in FY2014

• Processed born-digital material in 5 collections
• Processed over 2 GB worth of data, over 4100 files
• 388 hours of effort
• On average the processing completed over 5MB per hour, 18 files per hour.

Digital Archives Effort by Task

• 4% Obtain Data
• 1% Ingest
• 19% Appraisal and Processing Plan
• 71% Collection processing
• 5% Prepare for Access

Metrics are useful for:

• Creating and modifying workflow and deciding the tools to use
• Business planning for acquiring collections, staffing, budgeting, and prioritizing 
• Determining the total cost of collections

Digital Preservation Matters.

Managing Chaos Through Digital Governance

Managing Chaos Through Digital Governance. Patrick K. Burke, Lisa Welchman. CIO Insight. March 23, 2015.
     An interview that discusses digital governance and change. Organizations should have a digital leadership who, with the executive level, should initiate a digital strategy. If the digital strategy does not tie in to the organizational goals then problems result. Digital strategies that start at the bottom of an organization and are built only on a foundation of digital best practices may be helpful but may not accomplish what the organization needs.  Organizations need to make sure that digital area experts make decisions about digital standards after getting input from key stakeholders. It is the stakeholders that know what is supposed to be happening.

• Chaos has a way of slipping into an organization and creating problems that grow exponentially over time. 
• With so much innovation, collaboration and bottom-line focused initiatives involving digital assets, there is a very real need to provide a framework to manage this change. Digital governance helps with this process.  
• The opposite of digital governance is making it up and funding it as you go along, maintaining a project instead of operational view when it comes to digital. 
• The golden rule is if you know what you are making, how you are making it and who is supposed to be making it, then you ought to be governing firmly, particularly if you are trying to bring something to scale. 
• If you are just exploring, then some chaos can be good. That’s why I often recommend that digital teams maintain a research and development component that gets to explore the chaos.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation Business Case Toolkit

Digital Preservation Business Case Toolkit. Jisc / Digital Preservation Coalition. May 2014.
     A comprehensive toolkit to help practitioners and middle managers build business cases to fund digital preservation activities. It includes step by step guide to building a case for digital preservation, such as the key activities for preparing, planning and writing a digital preservation business case. It includes templates, case studies, and other resources to go in a chronological order through the step needed when constructing a business case.

The key activities include

1. Preparation; look at timing, your organization's strategy, and what others are doing 
2. Audit your organization's readiness and do a risk assessment
3. Assess where you are and what you need, your collections, your organizational risks
4. Think hard about your stakeholders and intended audience
5. Decide your objectives for your digital preservation activity and define what you want to achieve
6. List your digital preservation benefits and map to your organization's strategy
7. Look at benefits, risks and cost benefit analysis 
8. Validate / refine your business case; Identify weaknesses and gaps in your business case
9. Deliver your business case with maximum impact; Create an Elevator Pitch, so you have the right language ready to make your case to potential advocates in your organization. 

The elements of the template include:

• The key features of the business case and a compelling argument for what you want to achieve.
• Decide where you want the plan to be by a specific time
• The key background and foundational sections of your business case, a focus on your digital assets and an assessment of the key stakeholders, and the risks facing your digital assets.
• A description of the business activity that your business case will enable.
• The possible options along with an assessment of the benefits, and associated costs and risks. 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation Challenges with an ETD Collection: A Case Study at Texas Tech University

Digital Preservation Challenges with an ETD Collection — A Case Study at Texas Tech University. Joy M. Perrina, Heidi M. Winkler, Le Yanga. The Journal of Academic Librarianship. January, 2015.
The potential risk of loss seems distant and theoretical until it actually happens. The "potential impact of that loss increases exponentially" for a university when the loss is part of the research output. This excellent article looks at a case study of the challenges one university library encountered with its electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).  Many institutions have been changing from publishing paper theses and dissertations to accepting electronic copies. One of the challenges that has not received as much attention is that of preserving these electronic documents for the long term.  The electronic documents require more hands-on curation.

Texas Tech University encountered difficulties with preserving their ETD collection. They hope the lessons learned from these data losses will help other organizations looking to preserve ETDs and other types of digital files and collections. Some of the losses were:

1. Loss of metadata edits. Corrupted database and corrupted IT backups required a rebuild of the database, but the entered metadata was lost.
2. Loss of administrative metadata-embargo periods. The ETD-db files imported into DSpace did not include the embargoed files. Plans were not documented and personnel changed before the problem was discovered. Some items were found accidentally on a personal drive years later.
3. Loss of scanned files. The scanning server was also the location to store files after scanning. Human error beyond the backup window resulted in the deletion of over a thousand scanned ETDs, which were eventually recovered.
4. Failure of policies: loss of embargo statuses changes. The embargo statement recorded in the ETD management system did not match what was published in DSpace.

The library started on real digital preservation for the ETD collection. Funds were set aside to increase the storage of the archive space and provide a second copy of the archived files. A digital resources unit was created to handle the digital files which finally brought the entire digital workflow, from scanning to preservation, under one supervisor. The library joined DPN in hopes that it would yield a level of preservation far beyond what the university would be able to accomplish alone. The clean-up of the problems has been difficult and will take years to accomplish. Lessons learned:

1. Systems designed for managing or publishing documents are not preservation solutions
2. System backups are not reliable enough to act as a preservation copy. Institutions must make digital preservation plans beyond backups
3. Organizations with valuable digital assets should invest in their items to store them outside of a display system only. 
4. Multiple copies of digital items must reside on different servers in order to guarantee that files will not be accidentally deleted or lost through technical difficulties. 
5. All metadata, including administrative data, should be preserved outside of the display system. The metadata is a crucial part of the digital item.
6. Digital items are collections of files and metadata.
7. Maintaining written procedures and documentation for all aspects of digital collections is vital.
8. The success of digital preservation will require collaboration between curators and the IT people who maintain the software and hardware, and consistent terminology (e.g. archived).

 "Even though this case study has primarily been a description of local issues, the grander lessons gleaned from these crises are not specific to this institution. Librarians are learning and re-learning every day that digital collections cannot be managed in the same fashion as their physical counterparts. These digital collections require more active care over the course of their lifecycles and may require assistance from those outside the traditional library sphere...."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Building Productive and Collaborative Relationships at the Speed of Trust

Building Productive and Collaborative Relationships at the Speed of Trust. Todd Kreuger. Educause Review. March 2, 2015.
To make projects successful, it is important to create trust and collaboration among IT, staff, and campus groups. To create that trust, the staff must establish highly productive relationships with the school's departments, faculty, and students. Collaboration, design thinking, and innovation go hand-in-hand. Many projects fall short of customer needs, fail or achieve less than satisfactory results, including plenty of finger pointing and wasted time, money, and opportunity. Some of the lessons learned:

• Get on the same page
• Build and establish trust
• Provide the tools and expectations for success
• Focus on both strategic and operational needs
• Clarify process ownership and the associated responsibilities
• Recognize the desired performance and celebrate success

It is critical to have an open dialogue with various customer groups and to attempt to exceed their expectations. Another challenge is to ensure that people recognize the past as the past and not as an indicator of future performance. The best way to begin a change in culture is to identify issues and challenges that you can immediately address. The reservoir of trust is built one action at a time and emptied in a hurry. To steadily build trust, you must say what you are going to do and do what you say. Communication is the heart and soul of trust. It is imperative that you ask appropriate questions and listen to gain understanding. Collaboration should not be a project in and of itself, but the way in which we work.

Cycle of Productivity model. Processes and tasks must have a defined owner and be documented and published, and change must be managed to ensure that everyone is aware of the new expectations. The basic premise is that training, assessment of effectiveness, and feedback all must occur to ensure the process or task is completed as expected.

The end result "is one in which a culture of collaboration, coupled with a relentless focus on challenging the status quo, results in our encouraging, pushing, and helping each other innovate, transform, and differentiate."  

Digital Preservation Matters.