JISC Beginner's Guide to Digital Preservation

A discussion between the Digital Preservation Coalition and the Digital Curation Centre has led to a new UKOLN Cultural Heritage briefing paper on ‘What To Do When a Service Provider Closes‘.

The original notes for the briefing paper (written by William Kilbride of the DPC) were offered in response to a cry for help from someone working for a non-for-profit organisation that is closing down due to the recession. They were looking for some guidance on what to do with their digital collections.

The briefing paper offers seven point checklist presents some steps that creators and managers of community digital archives might take to make sure that their data is available in the long term.

The key suggestions are:

1. Keep the Masters
2. Know What’s What
3. There Should be a Disaster Plan
4. Agree a Succession Plan
5. Know Your Rights
6. Find a Digital Preservation Service
7. Put a Copy of your Web Site in a Web Archive

William commented on the guidance:

“This will be a growing area of business – and it’s illustrative of the gap between the advice that people need and the advice that’s out there.

Hopefully the Beginner’s Guide to Digital Preservation will be able to put more people in touch with information that helps them sort out their very immediate digital preservation problems.

The guide is available in Word and as a Web page.

There are now 82 Cultural Heritage briefing papers available on the UKOLN Cultural Heritage Web site. The papers are concise and clear and make excellent training materials. There are several related to digital preservation:

• An Introduction to Digital Preservation, (briefing 31): [About] – [MS Word]
• Mothballing Your Web Site, (briefing 32):[About] – [MS Word]
• Top Ten Tips For Web Site Preservation, (briefing 33): [About] – [MS Word]
• Preservation and Sustainability, (briefing 40): [About] – [MS Word]
• Developing Your Digital Preservation Policy, (briefing 42): [About] – [MS Word]
• Introduction to Web Resource Preservation, (briefing 49): [About] – [MS Word]
• Preserving Web 2.0 Resources, (briefing 50): [About] – [MS Word]
• Preserving Your Home Page, (briefing 51): [About] – [MS Word]
• Selection for Web Resource Preservation, (briefing 52): [About] – [MS Word]
• Web Archiving, (briefing 53): [About] – [MS Word]
• What To Do When a Service Provider Closes, (briefing 82): [About] – [MS Word]