NDSA:Staffing survey planning page

Excerpt from Meg's email that started this project:

"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."

Question: Should this survey start from a clearly-articulated definition of digital preservation -- including a set of activities that the surveyors consider to fall under the rubric of "digital preservation" -- and then ask who is doing what, who they report to, etc.? Or should the survey ask who within each institution is doing "digital preservation" (broadly defined), and then ask what that person's responsibilities are, who they report to (thereby refining the definition of "digital preservation" and more clearly articulating the specific activities that practitioners think fall under this rubric)?

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Use Cases:

In order to get a handle on what kinds of questions we'd like to ask, we should consider what we want to do with this survey. As you come up with questions and insert them in the section below, think about use cases for this survey and put them in this section.

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Notes:

Section 3.2 of the latest version of the TRAC successor is about Organizational Structure and Staffing. Specifically it requires the following:

• 3.2.1 The repository shall have identified and established the duties that it needs to perform and shall have appointed staff with adequate skills and experience to fulfill these duties.
  • 3.2.1.1 The repository shall have identified and established the duties that it needs to perform.
  • 3.2.1.2 The repository shall have the appropriate number of staff to support all functions and services.
  • 3.2.1.3 The repository shall have in place an active professional development program that provides staff with skills and expertise development opportunities.

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Please start a draft of questions we could ask in this survey here:

• What are the titles of the people who do digital preservation work in your organization?
• What department(s) are they in?
• How many people are there?
• What are the major functions you include in your organization's digital preservation work?
• What skills do you think are necessary in the people who perform those functions?
• Do you have org charts, mission statements, position descriptions that you'd be willing to share?

• Approximately, how many terabytes of storage space do you require for all copies of your content that you manage?
• Do you think that the number of people you have working in digital preservation is sufficient?
• In what areas are you missing expertise that you need for digital preservation?
• How many people and in what areas do you think you need for digital preservation?
• What do you think the *ideal* functions, structure, and staffing of a digital preservation function would be (setting aside anything you actually have or are likely to have)?

• Did you hire digital preservation specialists or "grow your own" (or both)?
• Where do you turn for professional development opportunities for your digital preservation staff? What types of professional development opportunities have you used?
• How big is your institution?
• How much work experience, in years, do most of your digital preservation staff have?

• Is your digitization setup right for you at the moment / Are you satisfied with what you have? (please feel free to edit this one)
• Is preservation the principle mandate of your organization or is it a secondary concern?
• Pick from the following list what kind of institution you represent: library, archives, museum, etc.