Preservation Pressure Points: Evaluating Diverse Evidence for Risk Management

Establishing a comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness and trustworthiness of a digital repository requires a broad range of evidence. Preservation can be considered as a complex spatial and chronological network of challenges, and associated risks. For example the organisational, financial, technological and operational contexts within which a repository resides and the extent to which it is capable of managing related threats must be ascertained if an audit is to determine the likelihood of the institution's success. Significant effort must be directed towards the definition of methodologies for identifying appropriate classes of evidence, their evaluation, and their weighting. Formal means are required to facilitate the analysis and comparison of disparate evidence types in order to enable auditors to accommodate a diverse range of physical, testimonial and experiment-based proof. In addition to binary systems of inquiry (e.g., does the organisation have a mission statement?) auditors must display an ability to distinguish the most persuasive examples from those that provide less substantive evidence of organisational competence. Similarly, if, for instance, a significant proportion of staff reveals that they have no idea of the content of their organisation's mission statement then this must be reflected in the overall organisational assessment. Comprehensive insights and informed evaluation can only be achieved after fully exploring the evidential basis upon which compliance is to be founded. This discussion of evidential appraisal techniques for repository audit reflects a series of pilot audits undertaken by the Digital Curation Centre within a selection of UK and worldwide data centres and archives, including the Beazley Archive, the British Atmospheric Data Centre, the National Digital Archive of Datasets, the National Library of New Zealand's National Digital Heritage Archive, the Florida Digital Archive, and, in collaboration with the Center for Research Libraries' Certification of Digital Archives project, the Dutch Koninklijke Bibliotheek.