Sharon:
I’ve spent much of the last few months deep in the world of strategy development, while researching and writing our forthcoming training course on producing digital preservation strategies and roadmaps. As I read through the related literature, from blog posts to academic journal articles, both digital preservation-specific and more general strategy theory, one of the key themes that really resonated with me was the emphasis on keeping things realistic. This included being realistic about the resources available, about the staff effort that can be expended on delivering against objectives, and about what is actually achievable within the time span covered by a strategy. It got me thinking about how we can deploy more pragmatic realism within the digital preservation space.
Paul:
It's such an important conversation to have and links out to a number of different issues that impact on our ability to take forward digital preservation initiatives successfully. It's not only being realistic about overall aims, but about how developments can be structured to make incremental, and therefore realistic, steps forward. Wholesale change in one go is difficult to achieve with the array of pressures on digital preservation projects. Trying to solve every problem perfectly is perhaps the biggest trap. The more you look at a digital preservation problem, the more edge cases you find and the more the project scope creeps ever wider.
Sharon:
I agree 100%, and I think it’s why I’ve become such a big advocate for using maturity models rather than certification standards to guide digital preservation strategy development and planning. We need that flexibility in how we think about digital preservation, because everything is so context dependent. A small community archive can’t hope to implement the same digital preservation approach as a large national collecting body. Maturity models allow us to set relevant and achievable goals for our practice. They also match up well with the tenet of “good practice not best practice” promoted by organizations like Digital POWRR and the Digital Preservation Coalition.
Paul:
Yes, there are certainly some key things that all organizations need to get right, but I agree completely that a general prescription for all is unrealistic. It’s vital that the measures we use to assess our maturity level or standard of preservation allow different kinds of organizations the flexibility they need to move forward in a way that is appropriate to them. Please tick the phrase "it depends" off your digital preservation bingo card now. Organizational context varies tremendously across the community and sometimes in a significant way. I continue to be sceptical of digital preservation developments that seek to automate policy decision making for all, based on the particular approach of a small number of organizations.
Sharon:
I wonder if another factor (I don’t want to call it an “issue” or “problem”) is that many of us in information management are not only very dedicated to our work but also harbour perfectionist streaks. Both of these attributes were reflected in responses to the Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Digital Preservation Community Survey. Many people are experiencing stress and burnout from not only wanting to ensure the work is done, but also that it is done to the best of their abilities. While this isn’t a bad goal to have, I can’t help but think, for our own sake, that we need to find a way to better balance our aspirations with what reality will allow us to deliver.
In relation to this, I’d particularly like to see us have more conversations about tolerance levels in digital preservation. What are reasonable expectations for the outcomes of preservation? What would be an adequate level of service provision? What would be an acceptable amount of loss? This could then influence not only goal setting, but also elements of our work such as preservation choices and appraisal decisions. Continuing to think about this from a practical perspective, what other advice would you offer people hoping to be more realistic about their approach to digital preservation?
Paul:
We definitely need to talk more about levels of acceptable loss. I'd love to see an iPRES panel on this - who is game for next year? To answer your question, I think it's important to step back, see the bigger picture and ensure our preservation approaches are aligned with our wider goals. Prioritisation informed by a degree of risk assessment can help to balance our efforts in a way that maximizes preservation effectiveness. If the last 1% of perfection requires effort that could instead push up our overall collecting and ingest by a significant amount, then a change might make a lot of sense from a broader perspective. It's not uncommon to see dedicated but siloed team members striving for unrealistic perfection in ways that might not be the best use of limited resource.
There's also a connection with the way we perform our preservation. I've blogged before about preservation approaches that front load effort in ways that appear tenuously useful at best. Being smart about when we consider performing format migration or how much metadata we need up front can have a big impact on achieving our broader goals - or not! Again, we need to ensure our work is led by clearly identified risk rather than speculation or "just in case" strategies.
Sharon:
So, to summarise, if we want to inject more realism into our digital preservation planning and practice, we need to start by acknowledging there is no “right” way to do digital preservation, instead goals should be tailored to each unique context. We also need to see progress as a series of smaller steps rather than big leaps forward, to help make them more manageable and achievable. To help us get there we need to think about the bigger picture and avoid getting lost in the detail, we need to utilise risk assessment to prioritise the best use of our limited resources, and we need to be pragmatic about how and when we undertake preservation actions, recognising that some losses might be acceptable. I hope this is a conversation we can continue to have as a community, and let’s definitely make that iPRES panel happen!
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