A survey conducted by the National Library of Australia for ICABS on digital preservation. This survey focused on the availability of suitable guidance documents for preserving digital materials.
They classify "guidance documents" into the following categories:
Primary sources - resources written specifically to provide wide guidance(not just describing a specific technique), and with apparent broad community endorsement. Only one standard (for OAIS), a very few guidelines, and some training courses seemed to fit into this category;
Secondary sources - resources written to provide guidance, but considered likely to be dated or without apparent community endorsement;
Local sources - resources written to provide endorsed guidance for specific projects, programs or communities. In many cases, these situation-specific sources may provide useful guidance for a wider audience, but those intending to use them would need to carefully consider their applicability to their own circumstances;
Embedded sources - resources containing some useful preservation guidance within other information, such as reports on projects or articles debating issues, proposing approaches, or critically analysing experience. The great majority of literature on digital preservation, and most relevant conferences and seminars, may be best approached in this light: as sources of some potentially useful guidance requiring critical effort to extract it and decide what is useful.
Standards and tools – resources describing specific approaches or facilities. Except in a very few cases, most resources of this kind appeared to be marginal as guidance documents. Many relevant standards exist, especially in the area of file formats; there are also many partly developed tools such as format registries and metadata extraction software, which may play a key role in digital preservation. In terms of guidance, however, these resources are of themselves relatively less useful than guides to where, when and how best to use them in the context of managing collections.
Current awareness sources – resources that provide a convenient way of keeping up to date on recent developments and locating leads that may be worth following. A number of subject gateways, discussion lists, project “knowledge bases”, and conferences seem to fulfil this kind of role.
Areas where guidance is needed
Taking responsibility for archiving and preservation
Managing digital preservation programs
Creating preservable digital content and working with producers
Deciding what to preserve
Transferring digital objects to an archive
Naming, describing and controlling archived digital objects
Managing legal issues that impact on preservation
Protecting and storing the data of digital information resources
Maintaining the means of re-presenting archived objects for access
Types of digital materials to preserve
General - covering a wide range of materials
Archival records including email
Audio-visual materials - audio and moving image materials
In 2004-2005, The National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) conducted for the IFLA-CDNL Alliance for Bibliographic Standards (ICABS) a survey on the use and development of standards in digital archiving within the international library world.
