Top Six Reads when writing a digital preservation business case

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These are the articles, project reports and blogs that we found the most useful when we began researching business cases for digital preservation. It should be emphasised that these are personal choices and ones which were the most relevant to our particular project. We have added some explanatory comment (again, these are our personal opinions).

eSPIDA Project – effective strategic model for preservation & disposal of institutional digital assets

https://dspace.gla.ac.uk/bitstream/1905/535/1/espida_jcpmcj_albatross.pdf

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/preservation/assetmanagement/espida.aspx

This was a two year project to ‘develop and implement a sustainable business focussed model for digital preservation’. In particular, the project sought ‘to identify the cost and benefits to the institution of developing a coherent, managed and sustainable approach to the preservation of its digital assets’. It examines the ‘why should we invest in this’ questions likely to be posed by the funding organisation, rather than focussing on cost models. The aim is to provide a method of articulating intangible benefits in a business case. This is a very sensible and practical piece of writing, which recognises the realities of Higher Education funding and argues against seeking special case funding for digital preservation, instead recommending fitting proposals into the overall business and strategy of the organisation.

Cost modelling for long-term digital preservation: challenges and issues Xue et al (2011)

http://www.academia.edu/1215797/COST_MODELLING_FOR_LONG-TERM_DIGITAL_PRESERVATION_CHALLENGES_AND_ISSUES

This is an excellent introduction to costing tools available at the moment and where we are currently in developing them. They recommend that there is a need for further work on the cost model for digital preservation, including across different industries. This work is now being carried out by the ENSURE project, which reports in 2014 - http://ensure-fp7-plone.fe.up.pt/site/.

Various blog entries and project reports from the Keepit Project

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/digpres/keepit

Setting institutional repositories on the path to digital preservation: Final report from the JISC KeepIt Project - JISC Repository http://blog.soton.ac.uk/keepit/2010/11/30/keepit-preservation-exemplar-repositories-the-final-countdown/ ‘Digital preservation starts with detailed knowledge and awareness of your own content’. Four exemplar repositories, all holding different types of data, used existing toolkits and documentation to develop preservation plans based on their specific needs. Although the project relates to academic outputs and research data rather than institutional governance records it is quite interesting and the blogs are excellent for outlining the day-to-day issues faced by each repository. It does require that you already have a working repository. ‘What we found by the end of the project was different repositories make different preservation choices, and that they are entirely pragmatic in these choices, not seeking to over-extend or over-emphasise preservation among their active plans, but to phase different tools and approaches into their strategies. There is no single approach.’ This is also a singular example of how blogs can increase the value of a project. The JISC Preservation Exemplars blog is a fantastic link to all of the exemplars, really well written and interesting, with personal views and case studies.

AIDA Project (Assessing Institutional Digital Assets)

http://aida.jiscinvolve.org/wp/about-2/

It’s slightly out of date now (2008) but is a useful framework for placing your organisation at a level of readiness for digital preservation. It is quite general, but useful if applied to specific types of digital assets – i.e. institutional records - as it gives an idea of where we should be heading/the ideal. It might be useful to sell digital preservation to senior management – i.e. this is where we should be and here is where we are. The new Toolkit (2009) has the same three-leg and five-stage structure as before, but features a new “two-tiered” approach, reflecting the Institutional – Departmental method of self-assessment.

DRAMBORA (Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment)

http://www.repositoryaudit.eu/

Created by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and DigitalPreservation Europe (DPE), the DRAMBORA toolkit is designed to help repository managers undertake an internal audit to ‘assess their capabilities, identify their weaknesses and recognise their strengths’. Although primarily concerned with the assessment of existing repositories, it would also be possible to apply the toolkit to potential projects to identify potential problems of gaps in provision.


PRINCE 2 methodology

PRojects IN Controlled Environments 2 (PRINCE2) is endorsed by the UK government as the project management standard for public projects. The methodology encompasses the management, control and organisation of a project. There are any number of examples, in all forms of media, of how a business case should be structured, but PRINCE 2 is still the best and most widely used.