Digital Preservation for DAMs

Editor's Notes

• #2: By Emily Kolvitz, Product Consultant at Bynder
• #3: The International Council on Archives suggests that digital preservation means that assets will remain accessible, intelligible, and usable regardless of technology. It also means that their status remains reliable, accurate, and authentic. Integrity of assets and metadata affects asset analytics, production, usage rights, and the story of the asset from creation to dissemination. Because of the transient and fragile nature of electronic records, without Digital Preservation, your metadata, your database and your assets mean very little. A Digital Preservation Strategy means that you have sketched out the roadmap for how your assets for your organization will remain intelligible, accessible and verifiable over time regardless of technology. It layman’s terms it means your record retention schedules specifically address digital records in your contracts, in your departmental policies, and in your day to day dealings.
• #4: One very timely and telling sign that not everyone has their ducks in a row on this one includes the IRS E-mail Scandal where digital records were completely lost as a result of a hard drive failure. When I first entered graduate school I most definitely had this idea that traditional archives were shining white beacons of truth, just as I’ve had this same sort of idea about DAM. Just get a DAM (substitute Archive) and you will have integrity of your assets (substitute records)--but that couldn’t be further from the truth. You don’t need a DAM system for integrity. You need a strategy. And you need it because if you don't’ have it when you need it, you will (not can) end up in serious legal, financial, or ethical losses: 1. Legal because you’ve been sued for violations in federal, local or state law. 2. Financial because you are behind your competitors in terms of digital strategy 3. Ethical because you were not transparent in your dealings or perhaps did not understand the implications of inauthentic records--which is in essence negligence
• #5: When I read about the IRS e-mail scandal I was excited. That came out wrong. What I mean is, information management (or rather the lack thereof) got very national, public attention all of the sudden. The thing we warn about the most finally happened--at a national level. And then an archivist, and not just any archivist, but the archivist of the United States publically shamed them for not adhering to federal law. Maybe I was right the first time--maybe I was excited. There are many IRS E-mail Scandals and Lawsuits in our future, and there are also precautions we can take as practitioners
• #6: Repurpose funds or lawsuit budgets to preventative maintenance instead of reactional maintenance--use that money for a proper archiving solution! Know the metadata--Know the EXIF,IPTC, Photoshop, and data fields in your database. Know what data comes into & leaves your DAM. 3. Update your departmental or organizational records retention policies to include a Digital Preservation Strategy. They may have not been updated in a long time. Guess what you have a new project!
• #7: Digital Preservation theory urges practitioners to create the metadata record as close to the time as record creation as possible. Vendors spend a lot of time talking about the return on investment for Digital Asset Management systems but not necessarily the consequences of not having a proper DAM digital preservation strategy. Murphy’s Law states that the more sophisticated the technology, the more catastrophic when it fails. On the other hand, Zipf’s principle of the least amount of effort defaults to the idea that everyone will put in the least amount of effort that yields the highest return on investment. A good DAM Digital Preservation Strategy could capitalize on the antithesis of murphy’s law and the ease of Zipf’s Law, yielding the hybrid law of “the more sophisticated the technology, the greater return on investment when it succeeds--with the least amount of effort. (minimal effort and maximum return.) But People don’t write stories about how great a business’s digital preservation strategy is--People write stories when people lose e-mails or when there is no digital strategy whatsoever. And I think after this webinar, it will be overwhelming apparent that a digital preservation strategy might require more than minimal effort….. It’s the kind of thing that you get out what you put into it.
• #8: A Digital Preservation Strategy is holistic, technological and environmentally neutral. It has metadata requirements that are expected to be applied at or near the time of creation and is not focused on specific standards. The strategy requires context and curation, and is supplemented with digital preservation procedures and recommendations that will invariably change with time.
• #9: Provenance, Record retention policies and a thorough understanding of the records life-cycle continuum, Inventory, and Selection and Appraisal.
• #10: “Provenance1 is a fundamental principle of archives, referring to the individual, family, or organization that created or received the items in a collection. The principle of provenance or the respect des fonds dictates that records of different origins (provenance) be kept separate to preserve their context” This is the traditional description of Provenance from SAA. However, there is debate in the scholarly community when it comes to the definition of provenance, and also pertaining to original order or respect des Fonds, which are important parts of the archival definition of provenance. How this can be applied to DAM, is that the context of your records creates meaning just as much as your metadata, file-naming, and folder structure do. The combination of a variety of factors including: embedded metadata, database metadata, naming conventions, and even where the file is at pertaining to location in the database or system all give meaning. In addition, logs pertaining to entry into the database, and perhaps logs pertaining to dissemination of assets also give you information for the history of the asset. For Works-in-Progress DAM environments, this type of arrangement can come about very naturally (think job-ticketing, campaign, etc.) To support findability in these types of environments, records aren’t arranged necessarily according to a brand, or content type, rather these would be facets to search on, but the physical arrangement would more readily reflect the initial business need. This is one way to retain authenticity. When I worked at the Carl Albert Center Congressional Archives in Norman, Oklahoma, I learned firsthand how to properly retain a body of records--you keep the records under the organizing body in which they were created. If a congressman or woman created these records under office during a specific time period, than that is the roadmap for their hierarchy. You map out who created the records, their relationships, their various offices, congresses, titles, subjects, periods in office, campaigns, and biographies. The richness of the record is enhanced when you know the context of the story. Respect de fonds can add to the integrity of your DAM in a way that almost no other facet can. An asset abstracted from it’s body of records loses meaning, context, and therefore, authenticity. When you have folder-level description for assets, and specific item-level description the item outside of it’s folder can mean different things especially in WIP environments where the folder name, item name, and item and folder-level description all give context, in addition to file info, file history, metadata and usage details. Ultimately, the questions are: What makes sense to the organization? What promotes findability? How will users seek out assets during content creation and more, importantly, in retrospect? Who will be the users in 10 years? Have we thought that far ahead? And what is the lifespan of a DAM? Record retention policies and a thorough understanding of the records life-cycle Retention Policies are Outlined--Repurpose this from your business don’t recreate the wheel.  The lifecycle of records includes the creation, use (both primary and secondary), storage and disposal of records. What are your retention schedules for DAM? What are your departmental policies for record-keeping…..more than likely they have already been drafted and you just need to tailor them to your unit. An easy way to compare this to traditional archives is that, the most often used records will be the most likely to stay on-site. That means that you can utilize your DAM usage statistics to curate your retention policies and archive schedules, in addition to already constructed departmental policies for record-retention. It could be possible also that your business unit will need to update or revise the existing record-retention schedules--especially if they have not been updated for some time. Inventory is important for assets in your DAM, but also in your organization, wild on the server. What is there? What could be ingested into your DAM? In a way knowing what other records are out there for inclusion into your DAM is almost a type of donor relations--where you are identifying the records of enduring value for your organization. The internal business owners are the donors, or perhaps the organization And on the other hand, an inventory of your existing bodies of records, subsequent arrangement, and description is the opportunity to re-evaluate your schema, continually prune the collection, update or add to existing description.
• #11: Society of American Archivists define “Selection” as “The process of identifying materials to be preserved because of their enduring value, especially those materials to be physically transferred to an archives1. - 2. The process of choosing materials for exhibition, publication, reformatting.” What is worthy of being digitally preserved? There is an important distinction to be made pertaining to selection. Who is governing what does or does not go into the DAM? Does everything have enduring value? Are you an asset hoarder? Selection policies can be outlined in your digital preservation policy documents which can safeguard you from ingesting records that are garbage or of no use to the organization and that do not fulfill your departmental or organizational missions. A selection policy very quickly can help you determine whether or not an asset belongs in your collection. SAA also defines “Appraisal” as “The process of identifying materials offered to an archives that have sufficient value to be accessioned. - 2. The process of determining the length of time records should be retained, based on legal requirements and on their current and potential usefulness.” What is worthy of potentially being accessioned and digitally preserved? Even after determining that a body of assets or records fit within your collection scope, it does not mean that all will be accessioned, and you still have to determine for how long, who will access them, and how they will be described. These curation policies will be shaped by your organizational culture, business rules, and departmental policies or they will be shaped by chaos. There is an opportunity here for you to meet with your legal team and or any other departmental stakeholders to determine what the legal or business requirements for custodianship of these assets throughout the lifecycle.
• #12: A first step to ensuring authenticity of your assets includes a thorough audit of your existing metadata, procedures and policies for ensuring authenticity over time. From there you will be able to identify what needs to go into your policy document for your DAM Digital Preservation Strategy. I would suggest keeping it short and sweet, as lengthy policy documents can be overwhelming to read for some people. In the beginning a one-page document outlining what steps you will take to ensure authenticity is a good starting point. This type of holistic assessment could be created by gathering a combination of existing resources such as the DAM Foundation’s DAM maturity model, The Enterprise DAM Checklist, your existing departmental or organizational record retention policies, Jenn Riley’s Metadata Universe,Sustainability of digital file formats guidelines from digital preservation.gov, and the ICA’s Digital Preservation Modules which are 8 freely available educational modules for information professionals. Some of these resources will help inform the policy, and others will help inform the procedures that will ultimately affect digital longevity and authenticity of your assets, regardless of the system you put them in.
• #13: Digital Preservation Strategy/Policy Document Drafted MM/DD/YYYY Next Update MM/DD/YYYY A Digital Preservation Strategy is holistic, technological and environmentally neutral. It has metadata requirements that are expected to be applied at or near the time of creation and is not focused on specific standards. The strategy requires context and curation, and is supplemented with digital preservation procedures and recommendations that will invariably change with time. Goal of Digital Preservation Strategy Retain Accessibility to Digital Assets Over Time Protect Company Assets from a Legal, Ethical, and Business Perspective Verify Authenticity and Integrity of Digital Assets Actionable Annual Benchmark DAM System against other DAM systems using Enterprise DAM Checklist @ https://vit.picturepark.com/Go/VhHYlusO Annual Review and Update Retention Schedules for Archive Annual Completion of the DAM Maturity Model Benchmark @ http://dammaturitymodel.org/ Annual Review and Update Metadata Schema Semi-Annual Audit of Assets/Check for Data Integrity Verify Metadata Completeness & Accuracy Audit of Data Coming into DAM, Data Leaving DAM (xmp, iptc, exif)
• #14: International Council on Archives Digital Preservation Modules http://www.ica-sae.org/ DAM Foundation DAM Maturity Model http://dammaturitymodel.org/ Enterprise DAM Checklist https://vit.picturepark.com/Go/VhHYlusO Library of Congress Digital Preservation Tools http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/tools/ Archivist Faults I.R.S. for Not Reporting Loss of Emails http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/us/politics/irs-did-not-follow-law-after-loss-of-officials-emails-archivist-says.html?_r=0 Jenn Riley’s Metadata Universe http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/~jenlrile/metadatamap/ Society of American Archivists Glossary http://www2.archivists.org/glossary