Monday 5 October 2009

#ipres09: Are You Ready? Assessing Whether Organizations are Prepared for Digital Preservation.

Planets (mainly Tesella) did an online survey targetd at libraries adn archives in europe and then opened it up to 2000 others. Got 206 responses (70% european), 1/3 libraries, 1/4 archvies. Roles - 15% DP, 16% preservation in general, 22% in curation, 16% in IT, rest other.

Being a DP survey the majority said they were aware of DP issues. 1/6 haven't really thought that much about it and 1/2 don't have a DP policy. Interesting stat, if you have a DP policy in place your are 3 times more likely to have a budget in place. However the majority of those budgets are project budgets and not institutional budgets to actively perform DP in the organisation.

Also in the survey people are having to preserve all sorts of resources including databases.

Do people have control over the formats they can accept. National archives - Yes, National Archives (No). Others are pretty balanced between yes and no.

Amount of content: most say that they have less than 100Tb of content to preserve but people see it expanding to much larger quantities [when it won't be any more scary to preserve than it is now, we'll soon have 1Tb memory keys - heard it here first].

85% of people are trying to solve the problem and are looking to use plug-and-play components as people don't want to replace their current systems.

Most important thing in preservation is being able to maintain authenticity [possible european stance]. Emulation is less important. In the middle of the importance graph was the the importance of using metadata standards, but no one can decide what standards to use.

[Good survey, probably worth looking up and answering it yourself, especially if you are involved in a DP project! How do the aims of your project align with the view of the wider community?]

1 comment:

lauren said...

I am an employee and I have not participated in survey but I know that my organization is in need of digital preservation.Nice blog.
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