Are you measuring and sharing your progress?

Overview: Self-assessment is an essential step for an organization that is working towards being recognized as a trusted digital repository (TDR). The process of self-assessment helps an organization to achieve its objectives, including to align with standards, to demonstrate good practice, and to leverage the results of self-assessment to prioritize next steps for developing your digital preservation program. All organizations should engage in self-assessment in a way that is sustainable - establish a project, identify phases, measure progress, commit to interactively revisiting results on a regular schedule.

In the early stages of DP program development, the place to start as soon as you have made some progress is self-assessment.

A next step that is very beneficial is to identify your peers who are game to participate in a peer review audit and invite an objective third party expert to review your results. The results of a peer review audit ensure that your work is understandable beyond your organization and is seen as aligning with good practice, and identify your next steps and priorities.

If relevant or necessary, it is possible to towards formal audit and/or certification. Any of these approaches to measuring progress should be part of your sustained approach to periodic assessment and continual improvement. 

Determining your appropriate timing for a self-assessment and peer review audit is one of your key organizational decisions to develop a sustainable approach to digital preservation.

Considerations for self-assessment and peer review audit based on lessons learned by others:

• Embrace documenting your decisions, milestones, and other evidence and examples for documenting your progress as an ongoing approach for developing your sustainable digital preservation program -avoid treating self-assessment and audit as a one-time effort that exhausts everyone involved. Documenting what you becomes a habit that results in time-saving, cost-effective benefits.

• Identify human and other resources you will to complete your self-assessment or peer review audit; then make the case for engaging in a project with phases to complete your results.

• Produces the information you will need to define a development plan for your organization to follow and helps to determine what you will ideally need to achieve by when.

• Provides evidence for stakeholders: whoever stakeholders are for an organization

• Enables transparency, a core requirement for good practice in digital preservation, for your program, ensuring that staff, users, auditors, and others know about what you’re doing as needed or desired.

The DPM Workshop’s TDR self-assessment and audit tool includes:

• a main page that maintains a running tally of your progress in addressing each requirement and a full list of the requirements with a link to each requirement and a status summary that updates as you go;

• one page for each requirement with:

  • the full descriptive and supporting text from the ISO version

  • the option to assign roles at your organization that address each requirements (e.g., digital preservation team, rights group, access group, human resources, senior management)

  • the option to assign responsibility for each requirement (using the RASCI project management roles: Responsible, Accountable, Supporting, Contributing, Informed)

  • the option to rank your compliance using a scale from 0 (not compliant) to 4 (fully compliant) based on your assessment of your compliance (e.g., can you make a case with evidence or examples ); 

  • the option to develop natural language questions using your organization's terms and language to make providing evidence easier for TRAC review participants; and

  • the option to document the status of your progress on each requirement (not started, in progress, ...). 

• an audit role that includes a dedicated comment space for each requirement so you can freeze your results and allow a person  or group that takes the role of auditor to review your results and provide feedback as part of a test or peer review audit;

• a mapping from the version of the requirements that became ISO 16363 back to the original 2007 TRAC requirements in case people started with TRAC and for informational purposes.

Using a spreadsheet or whatever you have handy to get started works, too!

Question for your team/organization: How do TDL DP Services support your DP disaster preparedness? TDL members contact TDL for more information and assistance. 

Source: Adapted from DP Self-assessment developed by the Digital Preservation Management (DPM) Workshop: DP Management Tools. The TDR self-assessment and audit tool assists  an organization in completing a periodic self-assessment or peer review audits with cumulative results. The self-assessment tool developed for the DPM workshop (version 1 at ICPSR and version 2 at MIT) is as a standalone web-based tool that supports iteratively updating and tacking you progress. See the DPM Workshop website link for full provenance information about DPM’s DP Self-assessment, document examples, alignment with the DPM’s Five Stages, and related resources.

Related Resources:

• NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation version 2 and Assessment Tool

• DPM Workshop Management Tools: Self-assessment and Audit

• TDL DP Decision Tree FAQ | What are the benefits of a self assessment for our organization

• Audit and Certification in the DPC’s Digital Preservation Handbook

_{This is a joint initiative between TDL Digital Preservation Services and the Digital Preservation Management (DPM) Workshop and Global Archivist LLC. Dr. Nance McGovern 2024.}

CC BY-NC 4.0 Deed | Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International | Creative Commons