Digital preservation

The Medalta Museum of Medicine Hat Alberta, with the assistance of CHIN, applied tools in the digital preservation toolkit to produce a digital preservation policy, plan, and procedures to help ensure long term access to their digital assets, including images, audio recordings, collections management records, and similar content. This document is the Policy that arose from that work. It is preserved in the format that will be used by Medalta museum. It acknowledges existing preservation standards, outlines administrative responsibilities, summarises organisational viability and security measures, and assures financial, technological and procedural suitability.

The Medalta museum of Medicine Hat Alberta, with the assistance of CHIN, applied tools in the digital preservation toolkit to produce a digital preservation policy, plan, and procedures to help ensure long term access to their digital assets, including images, audio recordings, collections management records, and similar content. This document is the Plan that arose from that work. It is preserved in the format that will be used by Medalta museum. It outlines the museum's objectives and constraints, then posits various solutions. Finally the plan identifies which solution was chosen, justifies why it was chosen, and outlines basic procedures for implementing it.

In 2011, CHIN conducted a survey on the state of digital preservation in Canadian Museums and found that while museums often held digital assets, few museums had a formal policy or plan for the long-term preservation of these assets. In response, CHIN developed a Digital Preservation Toolkit, consisting of resources produced by both CHIN and its partners, which helps museums create digital preservation policies, plans and procedures. Medalta Museum, a mid-sized museum in Medicine Hat, Alberta, has partnered with CHIN as part of its flood recovery exercise to develop its own digital preservation plan and policy. This case study is an account of that activity, and it is hoped that other midsized museums may benefit from the work found herein and the resulting documents.

The 8th Hussars Regimental Museum of Sussex New Brunswick, with the assistance of CHIN, applied tools in the digital preservation toolkit to produce a digital preservation policy, plan, and procedures to help ensure long term access to their digital assets, including images, audio recordings, collections management records, and similar content. This case study takes a look at how CHIN's digital preservation toolkit can be applied to smaller museums where finances and human resources are limited.

The 8th Hussars Regimental Museum of Sussex New Brunswick, with the assistance of CHIN, applied tools in the digital preservation toolkit to produce a digital preservation policy, plan, and procedures to help ensure long term access to their digital assets, including images, audio recordings, collections management records, and similar content. This document is the Plan that arose from that work. It is preserved in the format that will be used by 8th Hussars. It outlines the museum's objectives and constraints, then posits various solutions. Finally the plan identifies which solution was chosen, justifies why it was chosen, and outlines basic procedures for implementing it.

The 8th Hussars Regimental Museum of Sussex New Brunswick, with the assistance of CHIN, applied tools in the digital preservation toolkit to produce a digital preservation policy, plan, and procedures to help ensure long term access to their digital assets, including images, audio recordings, collections management records, and similar content. This document is the Policy that arose from that work. It is preserved in the format that will be used by 8th Hussars. It acknowledges existing preservation standards, outlines administrative responsibilities, summarises organisational viability and security measures, and assures financial, technological and procedural suitability.

The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model is a framework for digital archives designed to help ensure that digital assets are properly documented and that an asset’s authenticity and integrity are established. The model has been widely accepted by the digital archiving community, yet Canadian museums have been slow to adopt it. The Canadian Heritage Information Network conducted this survey to learn why.

Listen to Anne Kenney and Nancy McGovern from Cornell University Library discuss ten good reasons to pursue digital preservation.

This case study recounts the digital inventory process undertaken by the Canadian Museum of History (CMH) as a first step in developing a digital preservation plan and policy.

While institutions continue to develop an array of digital content, and products, they often do so without giving enough consideration to the ongoing efforts and resources required to ensure their long-term viability. This case study explores how the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) successfully conceived and implemented a strategy to digitize its permanent collection and develop a durable database infrastructure. It offers a number of lessons for other institutions looking for ways to develop their own capacities and infrastructures, even if that development is more modest or takes place incrementally. The case study also features a useful Health Check Tool for Digital Content Creators in Cultural Heritage Institutions, developed in conjunction with the U.K.'s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the U.S.-based Ithaka S+R.

This tutorial will help you understand how to set up digital preservation policies for your museum. The content assumes basic knowledge of digital preservation. However, for more experienced users, links are included to provide more information and resources. By taking this course, you will: - understand what a policy procedure is; - learn the steps and the process to develop a digital preservation policy; - become familiar with the institutional practices for developing a policy; - determine what a digital preservation policy needs to cover. Course Format: The digital preservation policy course consists of three modules, five quizzes, three self-assessments, checklists, printable tools and discussion forums. The course is organized into three modules: Introduction to Policies and Procedures, The Process of Developing a Policy and Developing a Digital Preservation Policy. You will also have an opportunity to assess your understanding of the material. The course offers tools you can use to analyze specific digital preservation policy situations within your own institution. You can send the results of these assessments to a facilitator via the course's email address to get feedback, suggestions or helpful tips.

The Currency Museum of the Bank of Canada manages and displays portions of the National Currency Collection. In 2001, the Museum decided to digitize the collection to facilitate auditing and collection management, and work began in earnest in 2002. There are approximately 100,000 artifacts in the collection. We had two concerns about the digitization process. One involved the entries in our database, which included small versions of images, and the other was the large versions of the images themselves. This case study only addresses the images.

This resource provides a digital preservation decision tree that helps cultural heritage institutions decide which of their existing digital resources should be preserved for the long term. The tree may be used to help develop the institution’s digital preservation policy (a key document that supports and helps determine the institution’s digital preservation action plan) or to support an existing policy for resources not already covered by it. The 2021 version of this tree differs from previous versions in that it includes a detailed subtree for technical considerations. These considerations are a distillation of issues identified and taught by Joe Iraci and Ern Bieman in the Canadian Conservation Institute’s “Modern Information Carriers and Digital Preservation” regional workshops held between 2017 and 2019.

As a deliverable to Canada’s National Heritage Digitization Strategy, members of the Digitization and Digital Preservation Discussion Group (a national information group based in Ottawa) produced the following literature review as a first step in identifying digital format recommendations for long-term digital preservation. The following document summarizes the findings of that review in a series of easily referenced tables indicating the digital formats that various major organizations recommend or accept for long-term preservation. Tables are organized according to media type, including text, still images, moving images and audio.

The digital preservation inventory template is used during the problem definition stage of any digital preservation activity. Even if your museum does not choose to pursue digital preservation activity, it should at the very least take stock of what resources it has, how long they are expected to be kept, what risks exist with access to these resources, and what potential impacts may arise as a result of losing access. If your museum should decide that some degree of digital preservation is merited, the information completed using this template will serve in the development of your digital preservation policy, action plan, and procedures.

Once a need for digital preservation has been identified, use this newly revised framework to consider various potential solutions and to select the one that best fits the needs and resources of your institution.

A well thought-out digital preservation policy must be tailored to meet the needs of the organisation that will use it. As such, no one policy is suitable for all museums. There are however, common components that should be considered in the development of any such document, and these are captured in The Digital Preservation Policy Framework Development Guideline. This is version 2.1 of the guideline, last revised in October 2012, and developed by Nancy Y. McGovern, Director, Digital Preservation Management Workshops. It builds on version 1.0 that reflected the findings of the Cornell Digital Preservation Management workshop curriculum development project (co-developers, Anne R. Kenney and Nancy Y. McGovern, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities); and lessons learned in the development of the Cornell University Library Digital Preservation Policy Framework. Examples of digital preservation policy frameworks that have been developed by organizations using this guideline include: The Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the Library and Archives of Canada, and the North Carolina State Archives and Library.

This policy framework is tailored to standards and practices suitable for digital preservation in museums and galleries, which generally preserve digital assets differently from archives. Specifically, museums and galleries document information about digital assets in the existing collections management systems rather than in a formal digital archive. While the core principles remain the same, the standards and practices differ.

Smaller cultural heritage institutions often do not have the resources to implement the archival systems recommended as best practices by the digital archiving community. Yet they hold digitals assets that require preserving. These recommendations, produced by CHIN, provide concrete steps that can be taken by small to medium-sized museums and similar cultural heritage institutions to preserve their content in the best way possible, within the resources at their disposal. These recommendations assume the presence of at least one computer on-site, at least one staff member or volunteer with strong user-level Windows operating system knowledge and a digital preservation budget between $100 and $1000.

In the fall of 2011, CHIN launched a Digital Preservation Survey to collect accurate and timely information about the scope and the state of digital assets held by its member organizations. This report provides an overview of the information received, as well as an analysis of the results, on a question-by-question basis. The data received from survey respondents is rich, and would support additional, more detailed analyses of the current situation. In all, 307 surveys were included in the analysis, representing a response rate of 22.3%. A number of organizations took the time to emphasize the extensive technical knowledge required to complete the survey. Not all organizations could find the resources to respond to the survey within the time-frame allowed. Key survey results reveal that: - Many member institutions don't have the resources to complete an inventory. - The number of obsolete carriers is quite low. - The vast majority of respondents have digital assets, and can prioritize them for preservation. - Most respondents use a small number of widely installed software packages. - Some respondents don't know the temperature and relative humidity in their storage space(s). A mechanism needs to be implemented that will guide new member organizations, and new volunteers within those organizations to older training topics such as digitization.

In response to member feedback in the 2011 CHIN Digital Preservation Survey, CHIN has identified and produced a number of easy-to-use tools that help museums assess their own needs for digital preservation, and guide them in the development of digital preservation policy, plans, and procedures. All of these documents (which are organised by chronological order of use) are accessible to museum professionals and volunteers who may have no formal training in the field of digital preservation.

Electronic Media Collections Care for Small Museums and Archives provides information on the steps that can be taken to improve their longevity. Taking action now will help to prevent information loss in the future.

The Digital Preservation Toolkit focusses on the development of a digital preservation policy, plan, and procedures for existing digital holdings in Canadian cultural institutions. Among other things, the toolkit includes templates for taking stock of your institution's digital assets, producing a digital preservation policy, and developing a digital preservation plan and procedures. This document is a guide on how resources in the Digital Preservation Toolkit should be used, and provides a workflow for all activity leading up to, and surrounding digital preservation policy and plan development.