ASSESSING RISKS TO DIGITAL CULTURAL HERITAGE WITH DRAMBORA

With the goal to provide a practical, evidence-based toolkit for assessing repositories and digital libraries, the UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) jointly developed the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA). The toolkit adopts a bottomup approach that takes risk and risk management as its principle means for determining repository success and charting improvement. This paper introduces the methodology as well as its associated online tool, DRAMBORA Interactive, and describes their broad, but flexible applicability, describing the pressing need for tangible assessment methodologies. Its coverage includes a description of experiences accumulated and lessons learned from the series of pilot assessment programmes that have made possible the development, validation and evolution of the methodology. DRAMBORA draws on experiences accumulated throughout 18 evaluative pilot assessments undertaken in an internationally diverse selection of data repositories (including the National Archives of both the Netherlands and Scotland, Gallica at the National Library of France, CERN’s Document Server, the Netarkivet, and the Google MBooks project at the University of Michigan).