Agreed - I think this is a great idea and potentially very useful for the larger community. Why don't we all think about the kinds of questions we'd want to ask in a survey of this kind and cook something more cohesive up at our next monthly meeting?

Great idea Meg!

Jimi

-----Original Message-----
From: The NDSA Standards working group list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Meg Phillips
Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 4:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [NDSA-STANDARDS] NDSA Standards and Practices - staffing and organizing digital preservation

Standards and Practices Working Group-
 
Warning: this message has nothing to do with the current wiki work.  I'm going to attempt to use the Listserv to raise a new topic and we'll see what happens!
 
Recently I've had several interesting conversations with people at other institutions about how the work of digital preservation is and should be organized and staffed within organizations.  We've touched on issues like: what different roles are necessary to do digital preservation, what is the division of labor, what kinds of skills are needed, are developers within a digital preservation unit or outside it, would people be willing to share org charts and position descriptions, and on and on.
 
Information like this could be useful for many reasons, including simply finding out how many different ways of doing this there are, benchmarking, identifying effective practices, and maybe making a case to strengthen staffing at our own institutions.
 
This topic clearly isn't related to "standards", but it probably is related to "practices."  I was wondering if other members of this group would have any interest in conducting a survey of institutions to find out how they organize and staff the digital preservation function, and how they would like to organize and staff it.  We could do something relatively simple, on the model of the storage survey recently conducted by another NDSA working group.
 
I would definitely be interested in working on something like this if the group thought it was appropriate and worthwhile, and if anyone was willing to work on it with me.  I'd be even more interested in seeing the results of a survey like this!
 
What do you think?
 
Meg
 
 
Meg Phillips
Electronic Records Lifecycle Coordinator National Archives and Records Administration [log in to unmask]
301.837.3111 



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