The 2014 National Agenda for Digital Stewardship makes a clear-cut case for the development of File Format Action Plans to combat format obsolescence issues.
In this installment of the Content Matters interview series of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Content Working Group we’re featuring an interview with Diane Papineau, a geographic information systems analyst at the Montana State Library.
In addition to a traditional role of supporting public libraries and collecting state publications, the Montana State Library (MSL) hosts the Natural Resource Information System (NRIS), which is staffed by GIS Analysts.
A conceptual model for long-term digital continuity of records and information assets
Regular readers of The Signal will no doubt be familiar with the Levels of Digital Preservation project of the NDSA. A number of posts have described the development and evolution of the Levels themselves as well as some early use cases. While the blog posts have generated excellent feedback in the comments, the Levels team has also been excited to see a number of recent conference presentations that described the Levels in use by archivists and other practitioners working to preserve digital materials.
The need for consistent, reliable data across business and academic units is creating an unprecedented push toward strong data governance practices on college and university campuses. Working together, leaders from the central IT organization, the institutional research division, central administrative offices, and the academy can build a valuable platform to support data-driven decision-making across the institution.
Starting the Conversation: University-wide Research Data Management Policy is a call for action that summarizes the benefits of systemic data management planning and identifies the stakeholders and their concerns. It also suggests that the library director proactively initiate a conversation among these stakeholders to get buy-in for a high-level, responsible data planning and management policy that is proactive, rather than reactive.
The Balanced Value Impact Model (BVI Model) draws evidence from a wide range of sources to provide a compelling account of the means of measuring the impact of digital resources and using evidence to advocate how change benefits people. The aim is to provide key information and a strong model for the following primary communities of use: the cultural, heritage, academic or creative industries.
In this article, we take a critical look at the current state of the art in decision making for digital preservation operations. The goal of preservation planning is to ensure that the optimal decision is taken to maintain the authenticity and understandability of digital objects. To accomplish this, the preservation planner needs to have an understanding of both the organizational context and the challenges posed by the quest for digital longevity. Clear roles and responsibilities for each process are a key success factor of effective governance.
The Best Practices Exchange is a website dedicated to information about the Best Practices Exchange Conferences and an online community for librarians, archivists, records managers and other information professionals dedicated to managing digital information primarily in state government.
Increasingly, content owners are operating repositories with large, heterogeneous collections. The responsibility to provide access to these collections on the long term requires preservation processes such as planning, monitoring, and actual preservation operations such as migration and quality assurance, which have to be managed and integrated with the repositories. This article presents a suite of systems designed to support the preservation lifecycle in repositories.