Digital preservation risks: Difference between revisions

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[http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september12/vermaaten/09vermaaten.html SPOT] (Simple Property- Oriented Threat) aims to provide a simple model for risk assessment, focused on safeguarding against threats to six properties of digital objects that the authors consider fundamental to their preservation: availability, identity, persistence, renderability, understandability, and authenticity. The model discusses threats in terms of their potential impacts on these properties, providing several example outcomes for each. The authors have also included a useful comparison of other digital preservation threat models. SPOT may help you to determine the different categories of risks that you will need to consider.
[http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september12/vermaaten/09vermaaten.html SPOT] (Simple Property- Oriented Threat) aims to provide a simple model for risk assessment, focused on safeguarding against threats to six properties of digital objects that the authors consider fundamental to their preservation: availability, identity, persistence, renderability, understandability, and authenticity. The model discusses threats in terms of their potential impacts on these properties, providing several example outcomes for each. The authors have also included a useful comparison of other digital preservation threat models. SPOT may help you to determine the different categories of risks that you will need to consider.


==== Other Useful Resources ===
==== Other Useful Resources ====
* William Kilbride, Risk Management in Digital Preservation http://www.bl.uk/blpac/pdf/gettingstarted_april2013_peach_risks.pdf
* William Kilbride, Risk Management in Digital Preservation http://www.bl.uk/blpac/pdf/gettingstarted_april2013_peach_risks.pdf
* Caroline Peach, Risk Management and Digital Preservation http://www.slideshare.net/scottishlibraries/william-kilbride-risk-management-in-digital-preservation
* Caroline Peach, Risk Management and Digital Preservation http://www.slideshare.net/scottishlibraries/william-kilbride-risk-management-in-digital-preservation

Revision as of 11:01, 1 August 2013

Completing a preliminary digital preservation risk assessment will help you to clarify the recommendations you intend to make in your business case. It will also enable you to justify these recommendations by demonstrating their relevance and urgency. This section provides guidance on how to conduct a risk assessment for your digital collections. It also includes suggestions as to how best to make use of the results of your risk assessment in order to support your digital preservation business case.

Process

The exact process followed for your risk assessment will depend on its depth and scope. The following steps are intended to provide a basic framework to help you get started:

  1. Define the focus and scope of your risk assessment.
    • The focus of your risk assessment will depend on the purpose of your business case: are you making a case for new staff, a new system, or a new service? Are there certain risks that are specific to these circumstances?
    • Decide how comprehensive you want your risk assessment to be: will you include general risks to your organisation, or limit your assessment to your digital collections?
  2. Assemble any information that might help you to better understand the collection, e.g. data gathered as part of a digital collections audit.
  3. Use risk assessment methodologies to guide or inform your assessment, and to help identify risk domains and specific risks.
    • DRAMBORA (Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment) is a complete toolkit for a digital repository audit, which includes a list of over 80 examples of potential risks to digital repositories.
    • The SPOT (Simple Property-Oriented Threat) model aims to provide a simple model for risk assessment, focused on safeguarding against threats to six essential properties of digital objects.
  4. Decide how best to describe and conceptualise risks.
    • Describing risks in terms of the consequences for your institution (e.g. resources not discoverable) may enable you to make a more dramatic case for digital preservation; focusing on causes of risks (e.g. inadequate metadata), however, may help you to shape your business case recommendations and make a strong case for them to be implemented.
  5.  Categorise and prioritise the risks you have identified.
    • Group risks according to common categories e.g. staffing, storage arrangements.
    • Prioritise risks by scoring them according to their likelihood and impact.
  6.  Considering your audience, decide how best to present your risks to support your business case.
    • Describe risks using terms that will be accessible to your audience.
    • Consider placing more emphasis on risks that your audience are likely to consider particularly significant.

Content

Risk domains and specific risks

Both DRAMBORA and the SPOT model provide examples of risk domains and specific risks, which may help you to identify risks to include in your business case.

DRAMBORA describes risks to different areas of an organisation's operations: SPOT describes risks to essential properties of digital objects:
  • Physical environment
  • Personnel, Management and Admin procedures
  • Operations & Service Delivery
  • Hardware, Software of Communications Equipment and Facilities
  • availability
  • identity
  • persistence
  • renderability
  • understandability
  • authenticity
Examples of specific risks which DRAMBORA suggests for these domains include: Examples of specific risks which SPOT suggests for these properties include:
  • Loss of key member(s) of staff
  • Legal liability for IPR infringement
  • Hardware failure or incompatibility
  • Sufficient metadata is not captured or maintained
  • Object characteristics important to stakeholders are incorrectly identified and therefore not preserved
  • Inadvertent damage to medium and/or bit sequences via hardware, software or operator error

Presenting risks

How you present the risks you have identified will vary depending on the purpose of your business case. The following are some general suggestions for presenting risks in a digital preservation business case:

  • Group risks under sensible headings, and describe them using terms accessible to your audience.
  • Prioritise risks to give more weight to those that most strongly support your case.
  • For each risk, clearly describe the threat, and explain why it is a problem and what the consequences are likely to be.
  • Where possible, phrase risks so that there are clear links with the recommendations you are making in your business case.

Scenarios

Thoughts on how to adapt the content of this section to particular scenarios that the business case is focused on.


Resources

Risk Assessment Methodologies

We have found the following risk assessment methodologies to be particularly useful:

DRAMBORA

DRAMBORA (Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment) is a complete online toolkit for a digital repository audit. The toolkit guides users through the audit process, from defining the purpose and scope of the audit to identifying and addressing risks to the repository. Completing a full audit based on the DRAMBORA model may be beyond the scope of your business case. However, DRAMBORA does provide a list of over 80 examples of potential risks to digital repositories, framed in terms of possible consequences. These examples may help you to build up a list of potential specific risks to our collections.

SPOT

SPOT (Simple Property- Oriented Threat) aims to provide a simple model for risk assessment, focused on safeguarding against threats to six properties of digital objects that the authors consider fundamental to their preservation: availability, identity, persistence, renderability, understandability, and authenticity. The model discusses threats in terms of their potential impacts on these properties, providing several example outcomes for each. The authors have also included a useful comparison of other digital preservation threat models. SPOT may help you to determine the different categories of risks that you will need to consider.

Other Useful Resources