Contents:
- Introduction
- The Five Organizational Stages
- Stage 1. Acknowledge: Understanding that digital preservation is a local concern
- Stage 2. Act: Initiating digital preservation projects
- Stage 3. Consolidate: Seguing from projects to programs
- Stage 4. Institutionalize: Incorporating the larger environment
- Trusted Digital Repositories
- The OAIS Reference Model
- TDR Mapped to OAIS
- Stage 5. Externalize: Embracing inter-institutional collaboration and dependencies
- Conclusion
This article describes five stages cultural repositories pass through on their way to developing fully mature digital preservation programs and is illustrated by Cornell University Library experiences on its journey to becoming a trusted digital repository. Each stage is characterized by key attributes and typical organizational responses. It emphasizes that technology is not the biggest inhibitor to becoming a TDR, organizational readiness is. This chapter appeared in the monograph “Digital Libraries: A Vision for the 21st Century: A Festschrift in Honor of Wendy Lougee on the Occasion of her Departure from the University of Michigan”.
This resource, with its inclusion of key indicators and case study examples per stage, clearly describes the stages repositories go through on their way to the becoming a Trusted Digital Repository. It is in fact, presenting an organizational maturity model for TDR development. Including key indicators for each stage under the categories policy and planning, technological infrastructure and content and use, makes it easy for archive staff and management to recognize their own place in the model. The addition of how Cornell University has worked its way through each stage contributes further to its concreteness. This is valuable reading for management and staff involved in TDR readiness self-assessment, who are looking for a way to bench-mark its own organizational readiness.