Jenny Mitcham is Chief Digital Preservation Officer at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and Caylin Smith is Head of Digital Preservation for Cambridge University Libraries (CUL).
The term Business as Usual (BAU) is not unique to the digital preservation community. BAU happens across sectors when projects, programmes, or other work delivered in a time-bound way become part of an organisation’s core services –or business. BAU includes activities that need to be carried out regularly with skilled members of staff, and it usually constrained by the annual or cycle-driven budgets (Roberts, 2013).
BAU is a growing topic of interest within the digital preservation community. Earlier this year, the Digital Preservation Coalition and the Digital Preservation team at Cambridge University Libraries (CUL) ran a workshop with community members to discuss what BAU means in a digital preservation context. CUL is currently transitioning deliverables from its Digital Preservation Programme to BAU and was looking for examples of successful BAU planning or input on what should be considered.
Participants were asked to reflect on BAU across a number of different areas: policy and strategy, staffing and skills, resourcing and funding, technology and infrastructure, collection scope, certification and maturity modelling, and user experience.
We had a range of different organizations and roles represented, and participants were encouraged to think about what BAU looks like (or would look like…many participants acknowledged that they weren’t yet there) in their own context. Given the mix of attendees and the context-specific nature of the topic, there may not always have been full consensus around the answers, but we have tried to reflect and summarise the discussion in the sections below.
Policy and strategy
For digital preservation to be at BAU, at the most basic level, there must be a digital preservation policy and/or strategy, and it should be acted on.
A few other key points were made by workshop participants. Digital preservation policy shouldn’t exist in isolation but should be part of an organizational policy suite. References to digital preservation (and relevant policy or strategy) should be linked, embedded and cross referenced from other key policies within the wider organization, kept up to date, and regularly reviewed over time.
Though many digital preservation policies are aspirational (at least in the first instance), when you are at BAU, there was an expectation from some participants that policy should reflect actual processes rather than future ambitions. Another participant suggested, however, that even at BAU, a digital preservation policy should continue to be ambitious, reflecting the evolving nature of the field in which we work. Digital preservation is never done, and continuous improvement is something that will no doubt continue, even once we consider ourselves at BAU.
Another interesting point that was made was that when you are at BAU, digital should not be seen as an afterthought. It should be recognised as being as important, or as embedded, as the preservation or conservation of physical materials.
Staffing and skills
Being at business as usual means that digital preservation is an ongoing activity for an organization. Staff should therefore be employed in permanent roles rather than on fixed term contracts. The latter could be suitable for a project or programme phase while an organization develops this business area, but changed to permanent in BAU, allowing staff to continue to develop their skills, knowledge, and experience within the organization as they advance within their roles.
Skills was another topic considered to be a priority. Whereas dedicated staff directly responsible for preserving digital materials must have appropriate skills and experience, members of staff in other areas of an organization also have a role to play. Staff should have an understanding of key digital preservation concepts and should know who to contact with any relevant questions or concerns. Staff skills of course will also need to evolve to meet new challenges.
One challenge expressed by participants was around how to make their work visible across the organization. If digital preservation efforts are going to plan, colleagues might not fully understand the importance of this work, and the role it plays in the overall organization. In the words of one workshop participant, digital preservation should be boring: it should be happening smoothly behind the scenes, enabling curatorial staff to carry out their collection management activities and providing confidence in the safety and security of data.
Resourcing
Many of the points raised during this section resonated with the discussions above around staffing and skills. One of the concerns was around the visibility of labour and potential impact on ongoing funding: it could be difficult to secure ongoing funding if digital preservation work is going smoothly, when really it’s going smoothly because it is adequately resourced.
Funding should be used proactively and planned accordingly in consultation with stakeholders, rather than reactively, where staff are forced to address risks and issues quickly as they arise. As part of this approach, digital preservation should be included in an organization’s planning cycle to account for any new or changing infrastructure and staffing resources as well as professional development needs. Dedicated BAU funding is used to maintain services created during a project or programme as well as to address future content or user requirements once a project or programme has finished.
Scope was another point raised in regards to funding. In situations where there are multiple smaller organizations under a single larger organization, there must be a clear statement of how digital preservation is funded and whether it applies to digital collections held across the organization.
Technology and infrastructure
A common misconception about BAU is that it only entails maintaining the outputs of the project or programme; it also involves undertaking enhancements over time based on new requirements. The hardware that underpins a digital preservation service isn’t fixed but will need to be renewed and replaced over time.
One point that was raised by workshop attendees was the importance of communication and developing relationships with colleagues in other teams. This not only applies to curatorial colleagues, but colleagues responsible for digital infrastructure and services, such as the network, storage infrastructure, and cyber security. Digital preservation staff may also need support from these colleagues to set up and maintain bespoke workstations for forensic and/or appraisal activities.
This collaboration, moreover, helps ensure that the infrastructure necessary for digital preservation is considered within the broader network of infrastructure required to maintain an organization's services. It also helps staff in other teams understand the importance of digital preservation and why digital preservation staff might have certain technical requirements; for example, why it’s necessary to have a non-networked terminal to appraise digital files from external depositors. Along with developing relationships with technical colleagues, relationships with external suppliers might also be necessary depending on the technical solution.
Open source was considered by some to be an important and desirable requirement for infrastructure used for preserving digital materials; ensuring any preserved data can be easily portable from a system was also highlighted.
Collection scope
Regarding collection scope, participants expressed the need for documentation (e.g., collections development policy, digital preservation policy) that outlines what data is in scope for long-term preservation. Indeed it would be hard for digital preservation to be at BAU if this scope wasn’t clear, as well as being aligned with the organization's strategy and objectives.
A Digital Asset Register (DAR) can help keep track of data in scope for long-term preservation, especially in cases where it is awaiting ingest into a repository. Depending on what information is captured in the DAR, it could inform future planning and help recognise patterns or trends in collecting that could support collection management activities.
The importance of appraisal was mentioned to verify the intellectual content of in scope data. Moreover, it might be the case that some data doesn’t need to be preserved in perpetuity so metadata about retention is also important for making decisions about deaccessioning.
Certification and maturity modelling
The question of whether certification standards and maturity models are relevant in helping us understand what BAU looks like was asked. Though the consensus within the group was that maturity modelling and (to an extent) certification was important to their organization, it was less clear whether they were relevant to a definition of BAU. There were some interesting comments around retaining certification or a particular level of maturity - and that certainly, if an organization found themselves slipping or losing their certification, this might trigger them to consider whether they were still at BAU.
An interesting point raised during the discussion was that these frameworks and models can be used to understand what capabilities are in place to undertake a process, but less good at measuring whether that process is actually happening. Being at BAU implies that not only are the capabilities there, but that digital content is working its way through the system as a matter of course.
User experience
When we discussed what BAU might look like to end users who wish to access digital content, there was a consensus around the fact that the user experience should allow people to find what they are looking for easily, understand what it is, whether it is available, permitted uses, and if appropriate, how to access it.
This should be as simple and intuitive as possible, with minimal training needed for users and a clear process for requesting help where it is needed. It was noted that access to preserved digital content should be ‘routine’ and ‘seamless’ and analogous to access to physical materials. There was also discussion about some of the areas of complexity in providing access where a greater level of knowledge may be required from users - for example being able to select which representation of a digital object they would like to access, or understanding how to use an old operating system if emulation is being used as an access methodology.
Anything else?
We had covered a lot of ground in the topics above, but wanted to find out if there were any other aspects of digital preservation that were key to the definition of BAU that we hadn’t yet touched upon. Workshop participants raised a few interesting points in response to this question. Once again the relationship with or comparison to physical or paper records came out. Many organizations already consider themselves at BAU when it comes to preserving physical records, so that seamlessness between the management of physical and digital record sets was seen as being relevant.
There was some discussion about timelines being a possible factor to consider - the time it takes from when digital content arrives at the organization to when it has been ingested, processed and made available for access. Other measurable indicators of success (or Key Performance Indicators - KPIs) were also discussed.
Priorities for BAU
At the end of the discussion on these broad themes, we asked attendees which of the areas discussed they considered to be the most important indicators of being at BAU. It was clear that staffing and skills, resourcing, and policy and strategy were considered the most important areas, with technology and user experience coming next.
In the wider discussion it was noted that although user experience didn’t score particularly high, this is likely to increase in importance over time as services mature and user expectations grow. The point was also made that being at a stage where you are actually processing content is also a key indicator.
Final thoughts
We wish to thank workshop participants for their valuable input. The workshop provided lots to consider on the topic of BAU for digital preservation, but there’s definitely more to discuss. Next steps for this topic include seeing whether a definition for BAU as it applies to digital preservation can be developed as well as considering what evidence might be collected to demonstrate having reached this point. We hope that we can come back to this topic at a future iPRES conference. In the meantime, the DPC plan to incorporate some of the thinking from this workshop in the next edition of the Digital Preservation Handbook and also plan to revisit this workshop discussion with the digital preservation community in Australasia (watch the DPC Events pages for more details). The CUL Digital Preservation team continues to blog about developing services for digital collection materials on its blog.