Assessing long term preservation of audiovisual digital contents with DRAMBORA

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in the UK and the EU-funded DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) project jointly released the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA, http://www.repositoryaudit.eu/) in early 2007, with the goal to provide a practical, evidence-based toolkit for assessing repositories and digital libraries. Subsequent iterative development has let to the refinement of its methodology, and the release of DRAMBORA Interactive, a freely available online tool aimed at streamlining the core risk assessment process. DRAMBORA represents a bottom-up approach that takes risk and risk management as its principle means for determining digital repositories’ success and for charting their improvement. The tool’s development and ongoing evolution has been informed at all times by practical research. More than twenty international repositories have been subject to assessment using DRAMBORA, enabling the validation of its primary methodology and offering insights into potential shortcomings and the extent of its applicability in a range of diverse preservation contexts. Furthermore, these exercises have enabled initial research into repository profiling, which attempts to identify commonalities within subsets of the repository community in order to inform and facilitate subsequent repository development and evaluation. This paper describes the DRAMBORA methodology, focusing on its benefits and developments, and introduces DRAMBORA Interactive. It goes on to describe the results of some of the most successful pilot assessments. Most notable is the work funded by the DELOS Digital Library project, which sought to identify core characteristics within a range of textual and audiovisual digital libraries, in order to conceive a repository profile that might form the basis for subsequent repository development and evaluation.