As anyone who has attended one of our ‘Getting Started with Digital Preservation’ workshops will know, I love maturity modelling (and talking at length about why I love maturity modelling…..) Whether you're looking for a light weight tech-focused approach like the NDSA Levels through to something more indepth like the Digital Preservation Capability Maturity Model, there's something out there for you. Why am I such an advocate for this process, you ask? It’s because I believe that if you’re serious about achieving success in any endeavour, and especially in the case of digital preservation, that it is essential to stop every now and then to take a breath and have a critical look at how you’re doing. Maturity modelling is an excellent tool for this, allowing you to benchmark your progress and shape where you want to go next. The information you generate from this process is not only useful for review and planning, but also for activities like advocacy and building a business case.
So, maturity models are great for getting an idea of where you are as an organisation, but how about the status of digital preservation more generally? Understanding progress across organisations allows us to understand the community’s needs and guide development of standards, tools, training and more. This information can also be a powerful advocacy tool showing where an organisation sits within the pack, whether it’s a message of ‘we need to do more’ or ‘we need to keep up the good work’.
With this in mind, I was pleased to hear about plans from the DPOC team at Cambridge University to carrying out a survey on ‘Maturity and Resourcing’ for digital preservation. The survey touches on a number of issues relating to the maturity of digital preservation programmes within organisations, as well as current levels of resourcing, particularly in relation to staffing. Data collected from this survey has the potential to be useful for a great many purposes. I’m particularly interested in marrying up information on staffing with the outcomes of the DPC Member Needs Training Survey we currently have open.
So, if your organisation does digital preservation, or even just plans to in the future, I heartily encourage you to complete this survey. It has been well designed to make completion as easy as possible and shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to fill out. The more responses received the more useful the data!
Please go here to complete the survey on ‘Maturity and Resourcing’.