This year I collaborated with Chris Fryer of Northumberland Estates on a project under the auspices of the Jisc’s SPRUCE funding. It’s ended up as a case study, and it’s an assessment of available digital preservation solutions. The main aim was to build outputs that would have value to smaller organisations, who intend to implement digital preservation on a limited budget; Chris in particular wanted something aligned very closely to his own business case, and local practices.
We believe that the methodology we used on this project, if not the actual deliverables, will have some reuse value for other small organisations. There are four useful outputs in our toolkit:
- A requirements shopping list – a specification of what the chosen system would have to do
- An assessment form – the same shopping list, expressed as a scored checklist to assess a system
- Example(s) of assessments of real-world solutions
- A very simple self-assessment form for scoring organisational preparedness for digital preservation, based on ISO 16363.
The Requirements Deliverable is essentially a “shopping list” of what the chosen system has to do to perform digital preservation. It was built from a combination of:
1. The OAIS standard (somewhat selectively)
2. US National Library of Medicine 2007 specification
3. Suggestions sent by Jen Mitcham (Digital Archivist at the University of York), QA supplier to the project
We wanted to keep the specification concise, manageable and realistic so that it would meet the immediate business needs of Northumberland Estates, while also adhering to best practice. The project team agreed that it was not necessary to adhere to every last detail of OAIS compliance. This approach might horrify purists, but it worked in this context.
The Assessment Form deliverable is a recasting of the requirements document into a form that could be used for assessing a preservation solution. We added a simple scoring range, and a weighted score methodology to add weight to the “essential” requirements.
With these two deliverables, we achieved a credible specification and assessment method that is a good fit for Northumberland Estates. Our methodology shows it would be possible for any small organisation to devise their own suitable specification. It is based not exclusively on OAIS, but on the business needs of NE and a simple understanding of the user workflow.
We used our documents to assess actual solutions (I looked at Preservica, the cloud-based version of Safety Deposit Box). Using these assessments, NE stands a better chance of selecting the right system for their business needs, and using a process that can be repeated and objectively verified.
This method should be regarded as quick and easy. Since we used supplier information, success of the method depends on whether that information is accurate and truthful. But it would be a good first step to selecting a supplier. More in-depth assessments of systems are possible.
Lastly we built the cut-down ISO 16363 assessment. This was suggested by the project sponsor to compensate for the technology-heavy direction we had been heading in. ULCC prepared the cut-down and simplified version of ISO 16363, by retaining only those requirements considered essential for the purposes of this project.
This deliverable was explicitly intended to complement and enhance the assessment of the repository solution, so as to be effective in the context of this project. In particular, all of the standard’s section 4 on Digital Object Management is omitted in this deliverable, since most of its essential detail is already expressed in the repository assessment document.
The scoring element uses the Five Organisational Stages model (Kenney / McGovern). This is a very strong model and I also used it in the preparation of AIDA and for my contributions to CARDIO.
There are already a lot of self-assessment tools available for repositories, including very thorough and comprehensive tools like TRAC and DRAMBORA. But with this quick and easy approach, we show it is possible for an organisation to perform a credible ISO self-assessment in a very short time. Users of this tool effectively conduct a mini-gap analysis of their organisation, the results of which could be used as a starting point for building your business case.
Chris’s final report on the project exists as a blog post. The deliverables can be downloaded from the SPRUCE project wiki.