DCC Curation Lifecycle Model Implementation Presentation


At the end of this session, you will have the information and tools you need to enable you to go back to your own organizations with a sense of what can and needs to be done to ensure strategic, long-term accessibility to digital objects, and how that enables your organization’s digital transformation strategies. Understanding this bigger picture will help in advocating for a digital preservation program within your organization, with buy-in being a critical step. Lastly, I will provide the first steps needed to start curating and preserving digital data at your organization.


1. Fulfilling our digital transformation strategies and aims, and our overall mission. Part of that is enabling staff and leadership with new digital skills and knowledge. Deeper engagement with stakeholders across the organization to understand each other’s needs and to creatively strategize how different departments play important roles in various aspects of a digital preservation lifecycle (Digital Preservation Coalition, 2021). And;
2. The risk to data and access if we do not preserve our digital objects (DPC, 2021). Loss or degradation of our content, and loss of metadata to find our resources are pressing issues at our museum.

Besides any selection or collection issues, the major issue facing digital preservation is technological, and at the core is data loss and technological obsolescence (Kastellec, 2012). Criterion for acceptance of a file format should include an evaluation of its functionality, metadata, openness, interoperability, and independence (Corrado & Moulaison Sandy, 2017, p. 203).

At the center is the Data, which are the digital objects or databases we are trying to preserve. And, as seen here on the slide, a definition of what data is, according to the model.
Not everyone within your organization will work on every stage but an understanding of each stage generates a greater understanding of everyone’s work and the challenges they face (Carden et al., n.d.-a, p. 5). Full-lifecycle actions are shown in the center but today I will only go in depth about the red sequential actions.

Starting from Create or Receive, I will highlight some of the key issues related to each Lifecycle Stage. What is on the screen for each stage is a definition, the functions, and tools to carry out the action.

For many of us in the field, we will find the answers to these questions in our collection, preservation and access policies, as well as our organization’s mission and strategy documents (Oliver & Harvey, 2016).

Important concepts are addressed in this stage, too, such as integrity and authenticity. Functions such as fixity checking ensure that a digital object hasn’t been tampered with or accidently changed, and thus it retains its integrity (Carden et al., n.d.-c). Authenticity is “demonstrated by paying attention to such characteristics as provenance (where the data came from) and context (the circumstances surrounding the creation, receipt, storage, or use of data and their relationship to other data) (Oliver & Harvey, 2016, p. 56).


The Store action is all about the quality and security of where to store data: security of data, the physical site of storage, the network, and files. The level of storage needed can be long-term curation, short-term management, delivery only, or discovery only (Oliver & Harvey, 2016, p. 179), and best practices includes:
• Checking the integrity of all stored data at regular intervals
• Ensuring that all data are stored on a minimum of two different forms of storage, and consider off-site, cloud storage, too
• Ensuring that stored data are organized so they can be readily located
• Frequent auditing of copies
(Oliver & Harvey, 2016)

In these actions the promise of preservation is fulfilled in using and reusing consequential digital objects or databases. We need to ensure that appropriate and standardized metadata are used to access the data, ensure legal issues for use and reuse are in order, along with access controls for authorized users, and providing tools for users to use and reuse the data (Oliver & Harvey, 2016, p. 197).

Conceptualize – This is where we establish standards that we want to flow through the entire lifecycle, so we create metrics and standards for file creation, operations, and metadata, and communicate those standards to our stakeholders to ensure consistency and accuracy.
Create and Receive – We need the highest quality images to enter our repository for preservation and create access copies from that. We use metrics to ensure image capture is the highest quality available to us. This could be a scan of an existing photo or slide or the original creation of one.
Appraise and Select – We cannot collect everything due to both time and resource restraints, so here we can consult our institution’s policies about what we need to collect, as well as consultation with our stakeholders. Our selection is driven by the museum’s physical collecting needs as well as curatorial and business needs. This might include the preservation of existing photographs or the generation of new images of our physical collection.

Preservation Action – At our museum, the images that we preserve are not simply a backup but a way to control our digital collection for longevity, preserve digital copies of our analog collection, ensure we can access the files over many years, legal rights issues, and the authenticity and provenance of digital objects (Corrado & Moulaison Sandy, 2017, p. 4). With staff turnover and technological changes within our organizations, these types of preservation actions ensure that someone will always understand the objects and the context of their creation and use.
Store – When we store digital objects, we need to think of standards and quality. At the museum we use the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s (NDSA) Levels of Digital Preservation and aim for Level 4 storage (NDSA, 2019).
Access, Use, Reuse and Transform – these two actions are taken together here because Transform is usually a result of the former, which is creating new data out of the original data (Oliver & Harvey, 2016, p. 197). A key part of our digital preservation efforts at the museum is to ensure our collection is available to be accessed, used, and reused for purposes such as research, curation and exhibition – both physical and online, and for corporate purposes such as advertising, outreach, and engagement. And not least of all, for our museum’s visitors via our online exhibitions, brochures, museum maps, catalogue books, and any images we allow free usage with Creative Commons licenses.
We ensure that what the images represent can be found by using descriptive metadata as a tool for discovery. The administrative metadata will alert a user as to whether they can legally use the image and its provenance. Its structural metadata will alert a user to related files, and the technical metadata will let them know what file format the image is in and whether they will need to compress it, for say, use on the museum’s website (Corrado & Moulaison Sandy, 2017, p. 66).



Description
Digital Curation & Preservation
November 2021
Presentation created for Digital Curation & Preservation course in Master of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University.