Are you ready? Assessing whether organisations are prepared for digital preservation

Abstract

• In the last few years digital preservation has started to transition from a theoretical discipline to one where real solutions are beginning to be used. The Planets project has analyzed the readiness of libraries, archives and related organizations to begin to use the outputs of various digital preservation initiatives (and, in particular, the outputs of the Planets project). This talk will discuss the outcomes of this exercise which have revealed an increasing understanding the problem. It has also shown concerns about its scale (in terms of data volumes and types of data) and on the maturity of existing solutions (most people are only aware of piecemeal solutions). It also shows that there is a new challenge emerging: moving from running digital preservation projects to embedding the processes within their organisations.