Southeastern has a new Google Group where Digital Preservation can be discussed. This is where notes from the SIGs and information on upcoming events will be shared. You can sign up for the group here.
Today’s topic for discussion is the Levels of Digital Preservation (The Levels), a benchmarking and planning tool from the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA). This is version 2 of the tool – it came out in 2019. (Some of the version history is available in the supporting documentation.)
The Levels focuses more on the technical side of Digital Preservation (at a high level). It is organized into five functional areas: storage, integrity (file fixity), control (security), metadata, and content. There are 4 levels. Level 1 (know your content), level 2 (protect your content), Level 3 (monitor your content), Level 4 (Sustain your content). Level 4 is hard to attain.
There are working definitions of all terminology available here: https://osf.io/rynmf
There is also documentation and case studies on how the tool can be used: https://osf.io/m6j4q
The Levels can be a good tool for assessing you current technical practices/workflows and help you plan for the future. It can also serve as a tool for educating others in your organization.
There is a spreadsheet available for assessment. Enter a 0 for "not started"; 1 for "work in progress"; 2 for "achieved". The spreadsheet will change colors based on what you enter.
Within each category (box), there are separate activities and you can assess them separately.
Let's look at the activities for Level 1:
Level 1 Storage: have two copies; document all storage media where content is stored; put content into stable storage
Level 1 Integrity: verify information if it has been provided with content (run a fixity check), generate integrity information if not provided with the content, virus check all content - isolate content for quarantine as needed.
Level 1 Control: Determine the human and software agents that should be authorized to access the content. You want to minimize who is touching it. Example: having a copy that only one person is allowed access to.
Level 1 Metadata: Creating an inventory of your content is a good first step. Backup and store at least one copy separately from content.
Level 1 Content: document file formats and other essential content characteristics.
Question: If I were to use Southeastern's Digital Dark Archive (DDA) to store files, would that count as a second copy and qualify as meeting Level 1 for storage? Answer: Yes!
One attendee noted a challenge of having many copies of the same image in multiple places. Part of the work of getting files to the DDA would be to identify/remove duplicates and create one set of files for the DDA.
Question: Does Southeastern's DDA dedupe files automatically? Jen will ask Zack. Answer: each file in a DDA submission needs to be unique, but the system (Archivematica) does not dedupe files. If there are duplicate file names, the system will fail to create a submission package and will generate an error report. (Jen's follow up note: this is actually a good thing because not all duplicate file names have the same content.)
Has anyone used The Levels at their organization?
One person attended a Digtal POWRR Institute where they worked through the levels in regards to their own workplaces. They determined where they were and what was needed to make it to the next level. It can be really helpful for making the argument to administrators for certain resources (if you have a receptive institution).
– More information on Digtal POWRR: https://digitalpowrr.niu.edu/
–They make the presentations from their work available: https://digitalpowrr.niu.edu/institutes/survived-powrr-wkshp/
– There is an institute planned for May / June 2025. The institute is free, though you have to pay for travel. (They do offer some travel stipends.)
One organization's current DigPres provider is sunsetting. It's important to understand that the tech/services you use to support DigPres will come and go.
Planning, documentation and people are so important to successful DigPres. Spreadsheets and documentation are our friends.
The Levels is really helpful for planning things out, saying to administrators/funders if we get x, y, z, we can get to this level of the project. This could also be a good tool to find out if you have files that need to be deleted to clean up storage.
Is there anyone who extracts files from floppy disks?
– One college: have floppy disk readers available.
–3 ½ inch ones can usually be bought new on Amazon. However, they are not as standardized as other storage.
–The 5 ¼ inch floppy disk reader has to be bought secondhand. There is a kit you can buy to make it an external drive.
–The Strong museum has a talk on describing extracting materials from floppy and other materials. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvNErPiD2eI
– Another library staff member has done work extracting files from floppy disks. She noted that one of the issues is that the program the file came from might not be accessible anymore. Sometimes it requires patch work to be able to access a file.
– It’s wild how much technology changes! When Jen started at Southeastern 25 years ago they were moving records around using floppy disks.
MARAC had a mini-workshop recently on Digital Preservation skills. This session was called “Suddenly Digital: Acquiring Pragmatic Digital Archives Skills On the Job”. A lot of their sessions are up on Youtube.
Would we ever need to re-scan the materials that are available in NYH? If there is a better resolution, new standard, etc?
– Best practices for scanning haven’t changed much since we've been doing this work together.
– If high res master files have been created following our best practices, then items shouldn't need to be rescanned.
– Some of the older access images migrated from HRVH to NYH are very low resolution (in the early days of CONTENTdm, there was no image viewer so we had to upload low res images).
– It could be a good project to replace some of the lower resolution access images with higher quality images. This would never be forced on anyone!
– Digital cameras have changed a lot - any older images captured with digital cameras could be lower quality than we could capture now.
The next meeting will be December 18th, 2-3 pm
Reach out to Jen if there are any specific topics you’d like to discuss. Otherwise we will have an open meeting before the holidays.