Blog Topics

Section of RAM

Specific topic/case study

A - Organizational viability

• Establishing a stakeholder group

• How you have shared knowledge about digital preservation across your organization, how you tackled the action-oriented mindset, how they engaged with senior champion

• Securing funding for digital preservation

• Using the DPC's Competency Audit Toolkit to highlight skills gaps and move forward with addressing those gaps

• Advocating for digital preservation with colleagues

• Succession planning - formulating a plan for what will happen to your digital content if your organization ceases to exist?

• Planning and reporting - using reports on digital preservation activities to inform management and forward planning

C - Legal basis

• How to move forward with this section

• Creating/updating templates for necessary legal agreements relating to digital preservation

• Ensuring all metadata and documentation relating to key legal rights and responsibilities have been identified and are easy to access

• Working with legal, procurement, contract management or information compliance specialists - how to build that relationship and work effectively towards shared goals

• Accessibility of digital content - how to ensure accessibility responsibilities are fulfilled in line with local or national requirements and legislation

D - IT capabilities

• Building and maintaining good working relationships with colleagues in IT

• Feeding digital preservation requirements into the procurement of IT systems (for example, using the advice included within the DPC's
  'Digital preservation requirements for procuring IT systems' [https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/implement-digipres/procurement-toolkit/procurement-toolkit-it-systems]

• Advocacy and successful working with colleagues working in IT department

E - Continuous improvement

• Developing a digital preservation roadmap

• Using DPC RAM to assess current level, set goals, develop a forward plan and monitor progress

G - Acquisition, transfer and ingest  

• Appraisal of digital collections (particularly where parts of the process are automated or carried out at scale)

• Automating workflows

• Engaging with donors/depositors and record creators

• Re-appraisal of digital content over time

• Integrating digital preservation tools

H - Bitstream preservation

• Defining, documenting, and enforcing authorizations to access content for staff

• Testing effectiveness of backups, replication, and integrity checking

• Predicting future storage needs and monitoring storage capacity

I - Content preservation

• Inputting into creation or capture workflows to ensure content is high quality and can be preserved?

• Capturing and documenting technical dependencies

• Implementing PREMIS (or alternate ways of recording what, why, who, how, when content is changed)

• Quality control after preservation actions are taken

• Version control of digital content and metadata

J - Metadata management

• Creating a digital asset register that works for you

• Establishing and implementing minimum descriptive metadata standards

• Applying metadata standards

• How metadata supports and enhances the re-use experience for users

• How metadata standards support a managed exit strategy from a digital preservation system

• Digital asset registers and importance of making metadata work

• Implementing PREMIS

K - Discovery and access

• Implementing full text search

• Improving web accessibility

• Testing exit strategy (mass extraction of all content)

• Providing different options to users - access to migrated, emulated, visualized content

• Supporting users with access to digital content

• Providing digital content in accessible formats

• Collecting information about discovery and access and using that to improve the user experience

• Using technology to restrict access to certain content for certain reasons