On 4-5 May 2011, the Cultural Heritage and Technology Enhanced Learning unit hosted a workshop for invited experts in the field of digital preservation. It was attended by around 60 representatives from universities and research centres, memory institutions, industry and other organisations such as foundations dedicated to digital preservation.

The event started with a stock-take of achievements and ongoing activities funded under the ICT programme, presenting the portfolio of digital preservation projects and the research roadmaps proposed by the community so far. This presentation was based on a report commissioned for the event which can be downloaded in the documents section below.

The main part of the workshop consisted in group discussions providing input to the digital preservation research agenda within the next EU framework programme for research and innovation (Common Strategic Framework, 2013-2020). A number of reports are now available from the workshop:

• Executive summary of the workshop report
• Full report of workshop (including executive summary)
• Report “Research on Digital Preservation within projects co-funded by the European Union in the ICT programme” – will become available by mid June 2011

I’ve been taking a look at the final report for Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (KRDS2) which is now available from the JISC Web site. The KRDS2 study report presents the results of a survey of available cost information, validation and further development of the KRDS activity cost model, and a new taxonomy to help assess benefits alongside costs, it was conducted by Charles Beagrie Ltd. and associates.

One of the key findings of the report is on the long-term costs of digital preservation for research data:

“The costs of archiving activities (archival storage and preservation planning and actions) are consistently a very small proportion of the overall costs and significantly lower than the costs of acquisition/ingest or access activities for all our case studies in KRDS2. As an example the respective activity staff costs for the Archaeology Data Service are Access (c.31%), Outreach/Acquisition/Ingest (c.55%), Archiving (c.15%). “

The conclusions are drawn from 13 survey responses for different cost datasets. Bearing in mind the Blue Ribbon Task Force Report and its economic framework it seems to me that research into preservation costing tools and cost benefit analyses are fairly key at this moment in time.

A White Paper summarising the findings of the Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) Market Survey is available to download from the Planets Web site.

The survey of 200 organisations worldwide and conducted by Tessella aimed to understand the requirements for long-term management of digital content. Contributors spanned libraries, archives, government, providers of digital library systems, museums and commercial organisations.

Key Findings

• The volume of digital content organisations expect to archive will increase 25 fold in the next ten years, from a median of less than 20TB to over 500TB.
• Over 80% of organisations already need to preserve content in simple formats, such as documents and images, for the long-term, by 2019, 70% will also need to preserve databases, websites, and audio and video files.
• Ninety-three per cent of organisations recognise the challenges of preserving digital content for the long-term and many plan for it: 76% include it in their operational planning, 71% in business continuity planning and 62% in financial planning.
• A digital preservation policy is a vital first step in preserving digital content. Organisations with a policy are more likely to include digital preservation in their operational, financial and business continuity plans, three times more likely to budget for it and four times more likely to be investing in a solution.
• National libraries and archives with large volumes of, and variation in types of, digital content, as well as a legal and moral imperative to preserve it, currently lead the way. However, all organisations will face similar challenges as the volume and variety of content they hold rises.

To get started on the project I will be reading a number of recent digital preservation reports including:

• JISC Digisation Preservation Project (April 2010):
  Study of the sixteen publicly funded digitisation projects and their long term planning for access after their project funding had stopped.
• Local Government Study (2009):
  Survey of local government archivists in the UK and their needs in order to deal with the long term management of digital records.
• Mind the Gap (2006):
  A major national assessment of the UK’s digital preservation needs.
• Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information (February 2010):
  Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access
• The JISC-PoWR Handbook (Nov 2008):
  Handbook on preservation of Web resources
• Sustaining digital resources (November 2009):
  An on-the-ground view of projects today
• DCC Curation Reference Manual (2009/2010):
  Curation manual by the Digital Curation Centre, chapters still being added.

All the resources I use for the Beginner’s Guide will be tagged with jisc-bgdp and added to Delicious.

If you know of any other useful resources please do let me know.