Digital Preservation is making certain progress in terms of tool development, progressive establishment of standards and increasing activity in user communities, but there is a wide gap of approaches to systematically assess, compare and improve how organizations go about achieving their preservation goals. Some standards exist suggesting certain functional building blocks and others prescribing criteria to be met by organizations to be considered trustworthy, but there is little systematic, well-founded work on assessing organizational processes and capabilities in a transparent, comparable way.

We have recently started a project to change that.

BenchmarkDP is creating a coherent, systematic approach to assess and compare digital preservation processes, systems, and organizational capabilities. You can find information about the project at the website. As an important step, we want to engage with the community in two ways: First, we are organising a workshop at this year's IPRES, to which you are encouraged to contribute. Second, we are running a survey to assess the community's perceptions and desires with respect to assessment and improvement.  The survey takes about 15-20 minutes to complete (maximum, I promise).

The goals of this survey are to analyze organizational processes and organization’s views on how to measure, assess and improve preservation processes. We solicit your opinions and priorities on the value of systematic assessment and requirements on how it would work for you.

The results of the project will be freely available, so if you are interested in improving your digital preservation capabilities, this can be the first step step to influencing the outcome. Results will be aggregated and anonymized, and results won’t be made attributable to individuals or institutions. The consultation has opened today and will close on July 26. Join your colleagues and ensure your perspective can be heard!

You can access the survey here.

Please feel very welcome to share this with colleagues who you think are interested!

Read more about the workshop below:

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

To provide an interactive, focused venue bringing together those responsible for repository operations, management, and governance with those interested in developing and evaluating systematic approaches for assessment, we are organising a half-day workshop at IPRES 2013 in Lisbon, Portugal.

We ask for short contributions from each participant on their perspectives on systematic assessment and improvement of Digital Preservation activities, processes and systems in organizational real-world settings. We encourage both practitioners’ view on their experiences, challenges and scenarios, as well as researchers’ view on the development, evaluation and improvement of systematic approaches.

Scope

The main scope of the workshop is centered on the following core set of topics:

• Goals and requirements for assessment and improvement (A+I) in specific (types of) organizations
• Existing approaches for A+I (Process assessment, SPICE, CMMI, ISO 15504, COBIT, Specific approaches in preservation and curation ….)
• Incentives, value propositions and return on investment for A+I initiatives and standards
• Case studies and experiences in previous efforts to assess and/or improve preservation capabilities and processes
• Maturity levels for digital preservation, curation, and information governance
• Prioritization of key preservation capabilities

Scope

The main scope of the workshop is centered on the following core set of topics:

• Goals and requirements for assessment and improvement (A+I) in specific (types of) organizations
• Existing approaches for A+I (Process assessment, SPICE, CMMI, ISO 15504, COBIT, Specific approaches in preservation and curation ….)
• Incentives, value propositions and return on investment for A+I initiatives and standards
• Case studies and experiences in previous efforts to assess and/or improve preservation capabilities and processes
• Maturity levels for digital preservation, curation, and information governance
• Prioritization of key preservation capabilities

Format and mode of submissions

Papers must be submitted in PDF format and should be 2-8 pages. They should conform to the ACM SIG template. Three to five keywords characterizing the paper should be indicated at the end of the abstract. It is expected that at least one author of each accepted challenge will register for and attend the workshop. Submissions should be uploaded via easychair.

Program committee

• Christoph Becker, Vienna University of Technology (chair)
• Artur Caetano, IST, Technical University of Lisbon and INESC-ID (chair)
• Hannes Kulovits, Austrian State Archives
• Meg Philips, NARA
• Raivo Ruusalepp, Estonian Business Archive
• Alberto Silva, IST, Technical University of Lisbon
• Angela Dappert, DPC
• Erik Proper, Henri Tudor CRP, Luxembourg
• Jose Barateiro, LNEC Lisbon
• Miguel Mira da Silva, IST, Technical University of Lisbon
• Jose Borbinha, INESC-ID Lisbon
• Neil Grindley, JISC

Important Dates

• First call for papers: June 2013
• Full paper submission: 19 July 2013
• Author notification: 13 August 2013
• Final paper submission: 23 August 2013
• Workshop: 6 September 2013

Workshop page: http://benchmark-dp.org/2013/06/13/capability-assessment-and-improvement-workshop-at-ipres-2013/