NDSA Staffing Survey Working Group

Digital preservation is people. Across the world, how digital preservation practitioners are advocated for and trained and how programs are staffed, organized, and evaluated over time, is arguably more important to successful, sustainable digital preservation than any technology. The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA), an international membership organization that focuses on supporting over 278 members around the world by providing advocacy and expertise for the preservation of digital heritage, identified the importance of gathering and openly sharing a dataset about staffing, as it would allow the organization to better understand the needs of a developing field over time. An NDSA working group created the first digital preservation staffing survey in 2012, and repeated this survey in 2017, which established the first longitudinal open dataset of its kind. These surveys collected one response per organization, focusing on staffing trends at an organizational level in the field.

However, the field of digital preservation has grown and changed rapidly since 2017. The third NDSA Staffing Survey Working Group (“Group”), formed in 2021, and the thirteen member team undertook a significant redesign of the survey to ensure that it captures a more detailed picture of the current state of digital preservation staffing while sustaining important longitudinal questions for the dataset.

These updates include an intentional collaborative focus on international participation, the integration of related digital preservation research, and the extensive reconfiguration of the survey to allow for individual, rather than organizational, participation. In addition to allowing for multiple individuals at one organization to participate, this shift enabled the survey to collect some individual demographic data about digital preservation practitioners for the first time.

To achieve these goals of updating and refining the survey, the 2021 Group adopted an intensively collaborative working approach. Individuals from various organization types and sizes and international participants were openly recruited to join the Group to ensure diverse viewpoints and staffing experiences were represented from the beginning in the survey design. The past survey questions, datasets and final reports were reviewed for longitudinal use, and results from related international digital heritage surveys and digital preservation research were evaluated to build related research into the survey where possible.

The Group split into four cooperative teams to allow for small subgroups to focus on particular thematic areas of the survey (e.g., Background Information, Staffing Qualifications and Training). Each subgroup analyzed existing questions for continued relevance, potential redesign, and to guide the focused development of new questions that would center individual practitioner experience. The full Group came back together during monthly meetings to collaborate and align the survey design process. Because of the major design shift to allow for individual, rather than organizational, responses, the development of demographic questions, such as those related to gender and salary, relied on cooperative engagement with survey design experts in the digital heritage field, such as the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Because the 2021 Survey sought individuals’ honest opinions on staffing at their organizations, the Group collectively decided to not gather more identifying information than necessary. In the final stages of survey design, the Group involved additional members of the digital preservation and related communities to test and provide feedback on the survey. At the survey’s close, it had been completed by a record 269 participants from 16 countries working in various types of organizations and roles.

The survey redesign work undertaken by the Group yielded new, noteworthy data. Analysis revealed one of the clearest trends throughout the survey: perceptions of digital preservation seemed to shift according to respondents' roles within their organizations. The significance of this correlation is highlighted in the chart below, comparing position type to level of agreement that “digital preservation is a high priority for my organization.”

Comparing position type to agreement that digital preservation is prioritized 

The Group published the results of the 2021 Staffing Survey in August 2022, and the report has been downloaded over 200 times. The output and impact of the Group and published report and dataset is multinational and multi-modal. In addition to numerous presentations and panels that Group members created to communicate results and to engage with and receive feedback from the global digital preservation community, the iterative and collaborative process of the survey redesign also led to the creation of new NDSA survey design best practices. The development of these best practices will improve the quality and sustainability of these shared resources for the field, and demonstrates how collaborative work across distinct types of international organizations can strengthen and sustain crucial community resources over time. This collaborative approach provides a model for how to build on existing research and resources while critically examining evolving trends and challenges in the field.

On a more granular level, the impact of the survey open dataset and report for digital preservation practitioners and programs was substantial. This includes sentiments from individuals in their survey responses reacting to the redesign and question set who appreciated the feeling of being “seen” and that their experiences were understood and validated. The Group has heard from individuals about how the survey report and dataset helped them to shape the formation of departments, create strategies for advocacy, inform educational curriculums and training development, lead community discussions, and confirm and complement other datasets and research related to the field. One individual commented, “...[the 2021 Survey] reinforced our findings in [current grant], especially around the need for advocacy at higher management levels and more robust and consistent training opportunities.” In addition to multiple citations of the survey results in peer-reviewed digital preservation literature, the Survey is also included in two forthcoming reports to two different major grant funders.

The work of the 2021 Staffing Survey Working Group shows how collaborative, open digital preservation research can strengthen the quality and sustainability of shared resources for the field. A truly cooperative effort both by and for the digital preservation community, their research approach provides a sustainable framework for continued use by the broader field as it encounters new challenges and reaches new stages of maturity.