Contents:
- Introduction and Background
- Comparison of Existing Models
- Levels of Digital Preservation
- Using the Guidelines
- Feedback and Future Work
- Acknowledgements
- References
This document presents a tiered set of guidelines and practices, in a one-page matrix, intended to offer clear, baseline instructions on preserving digital content. It is structured into four progressive levels of sophistication: 1) Protect your data ; 2) Know your data; 3) Monitor your data; 4) Repair your data, and covers five functional areas: Storage and Geographic location; File Fixity and Data Integrity; Information Security; Metadata; and File Formats. The recommended activities are agnostic towards both content type and technology and is meant to offer organizations of all sizes and resource levels a practical blueprint to perform digital preservation.
It begins by providing background on the NDSA work, briefly compares this model to other digital preservation models, then provides a more detailed explanation and rational for the activities listed. It ends by proposing a variety of ways the model can be used by organizations, outlines how to provide feedback and sketches future work on the document in the future.
In this document the authors describe a set of goals they set out to meet with this matrix including: that it be agnostic to systems and content types, comprehensive but simple, identify immediate steps while at the same time offering a roadmap to better performance, demystify the ‘bewildering array’ of activities, provide enough detail but keep it succinct enough to keep it to one page, stay clear of jargon and focus on practices not policy. All of these goals have been met. By including the reasoning behind the approach as well as suggested uses for the matrix, the authors have increased its usefulness. It can help digital preservation staff articulate their needs more easily and provides a realistic step by step approach to implementing ways to decrease risk to digital collections. It does not focus on organization and policy issues that need to be addressed within a broad digital preservation program. The authors point out that it is a work in progress. An interesting discussion in a LC Signals blog, on the label of the last row demonstrates the continuing search for clarity in practice.