1. Assessing Your Preservation Readiness: a
DuraSpace Webinar
Liz Bishoff, The Bishoff Group LLC
Tom Clareson, LYRASIS
Knowledge Futures: Digital Preservation
Planning Series, Webinar 1
February 7, 2012
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2. Agenda
Welcome—Carissa
Introductions—Liz Bishoff
Why Preserving Digital Resources is an Issue--Tom
The Policy Environment—Tom
Digital Preservation Policies – Survey Results--Liz
Standards and Assessment—Tom
Key Steps to Plan Development--Liz
Risk Assessment and Planning--Liz
Keys to Implementation--Liz
Take home concepts—Tom
Wrap up and questions--Tom
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3. Why Preserving Digital Resources
is an Issue?
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4. Preserving Digital Resources: Why is it an issue?
Technological Changes
File formats change
Media Storage—local vs. distributed
Organizational challenges
Resources—Human, Financial & Collections
New partnerships and expectations
Long-term access to digital resources
System Architecture
Used proprietary systems
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5. Organizational Challenges
Technical expertise
New partnerships
Content creators: what is their role?
Collaborate on preservation programs
We need to understand your scope
Who are we preserving for?
What should we preserve?
How will we preserve it?
How do we assure it’s accessible in the long
term?
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6. Fact or Fiction???
Digital preservation is more challenging and
complex than preservation of analog objects
We can’t do anything because we don’t have
all the answers
Digital preservation is a technical problem.
We’re waiting for THE perfect solution
In the current financial environment we just
can’t move forward
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8. The Policy environment
And those pesky definitions
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9. Policy environment
‘Perhaps digital preservation is the wrong label. Maybe
we should be using preserving for long term access.
Maybe we can gain more traction with the public if we
use different terminology.’
Dame Lynn Brindley, CEO British Library, September 29,
2008
‘Too often an organization undertakes responsibility for
digital stewardship without first ensuring that the necessary
policies and controls are in place or that the institution itself
views digital preservation as a core mandate.’
Kenney & Buckley, Developing Digital Preservation
Programs: Cornell Survey of Digital Readiness, Digi-
News,2005
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10. Definition and Goal of Long Term
Access/Digital Preservation
Definitions:
Managed activities necessary for ensuring both the
long-term maintenance of a byte stream and continued
accessibility of its contents. (TDR)
Goal:
Aims to ensure that future users will be able to
discover, retrieve, render, manipulate, interpret and
use digital information in face of constantly changing
technology
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11. ALCTS PARS digital preservation definitions
Short definition:
Digital preservation combines policies, strategies and
actions that ensure access to digital content over time.
Medium definition:
Digital preservation combines policies, strategies, and
actions that ensure access to content that is born digital
or converted to digital form regardless of the challenges
of file corruption, media failure and technological
change. The goal of digital preservation is the most
accurate rendering possible of authenticated content
over time.
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12. Backup vs. digital preservation
‘Disaster recovery strategies and backup systems are not sufficient to
ensure survival and access to authentic digital resources over time. A
backup is short-term data recovery solution following loss or
corruption and is fundamentally different to an electronic
preservation archive.’
o JISC. Digital Preservation: Continued Access to authentic digital
assets. (November, 2006)
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13. Digital Preservation Policies:
Survey results
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14. Preservation commitment
Does your 2011 Survey
organization include
results
preservation of digital
holdings as part of Yes—56%
your Planning—30%
mission/purpose? No—12%
Participant poll
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15. Resource allocation
Is your organization 2011 Survey
specifically allocating
results
resources to fulfill this
mission? Yes—67%
Participant poll No—31%
Don’t know—
2%
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16. Digital preservation policy
Has your 2011 Survey
organization results
developed digital Yes—18.3%
preservation In
policies or plans? development—
66.7%
No—13.3%
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17. Policies/Procedures include digital
holdings
Policy Yes No Procedure yes no
Mission 31% 53.1%
Mission 22.5% 49.5%
Coll Dev 28% 38.8%
Coll Dev 30.6% 36.9%
Emer Prep 27% 44.1%
Emer Prep 23.4% 43.9%
Preserv 21.6% 40.5%
Rights 32.4% 40.5%
Preserv 20.7% 39.6%
Rights 26.1% 44.1%
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18. Policies/Procedures include digital
holdings 2011
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19. Standards and Assessment
A quick overview
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20. Open Archival Information System (OAIS)
http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0b1.pdf
Conceptual framework for an archival system dedicated to
preserving and maintaining access to digital information over the
long term
Defines 6 functions of a digital archive
Ingest
Archival storage
Data management
Administration
Access
Preservation planning
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21. Open Archival Information System—Just a
refresher.
Preservation Planning
P Data C
Management
R O
O Descriptive
queries
N
Info.
D result sets S
SIP Ingest Access
U Archival orders U
C Storage M
DIP
E AIP E
R R
Administration
MANAGEMENT
SIP = Submission Information Package
AIP = Archival Information Package
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Adapted from OAIS Tutorial presented at the Library of Congress, 2003-06-13

22. Digital Preservation Planning:
Key Steps to Plan Development
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23. Preservation Planning Includes…
1. Rationale for digital preservation
2. Statement of Organizational commitment
3. Statement of Financial commitment
4. Preservation of authentic resources and quality
control
5. Metadata creation
6. Roles and responsibilities
7. Training/education
8. Monitoring and Review
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24. Rationale, Mandates, Community
DISCUSSION
What is your rationale for
long term access?
Do you have mandates?
How will you begin
addressing these issues?
Who is your designated
community/producers of
content?
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25. Implementation begins with discussion
of…
Selection – What needs to be preserve? Formats?
Born Digital vs. Reformatted? Licensed vs. owned?
Capture –What collections do we have? How do we
know what we need to preserve? How do we gain
physical control over digital material?
Storage and Management –What is needed? Where
is it? Is it secure? How important is security?
Access –Who will have access?What kind of access is
provided
Organizational support—What skills and knowledge
do we need?
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26. Risk Assessment and planning
Understanding your digital collections
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27. Risks to digital collections
Can be technical
Can be physical
Can be organizational
Can be socio-cultural
Can be legal
Can be financial
Can be political
Can be contractual
Can be force majeur
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28. Determining if you are meeting your
mandate using risk assessment
Assess organizational commitments
Organization
Financial
Inventory your digital assets
Categorize by format (TIFF, JPEG)
Number of files
Software/hardware/operating system to create
Storage environment for digital resources
Hardware, software, operating environment
Age, maintenance environment
Metadata available to support these resources.
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29. Conclusion--Key ideas
Make a commitment to long term access
Include in your mission
Tie your program to mandates
Legal, moral and community
Assure sustainability of digital collection
Demonstrated through resource allocation
Identify your specific needs through risk assessment
Implement a program of monitoring and review
Designate who will monitor and review the program
Have a technology platform that supports you specific needs
May be multiple solutions for different needs
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30. Take Home Concepts
Use standards and best
practices
Solution sounds complex,
but they don’t have to be
Solutions are here
Don’t wait for the perfect
solution
Don’t reinvent the wheel
Expect and plan for change
This is all a work in
progress
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31. Questions???
Thank you
Liz Bishoff
Liz.bishoff@gmail.com
Tom Clareson
Tom.clareson@lyrasis.org
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