NDSA:Staffing survey planning page

Project Origin

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."

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.

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.

Should the survey start with a definition of digital preservation? If so, which one?

• • from http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/about/:
    • "Digital preservation is the active management of digital content over time to ensure ongoing access"
  • from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_preservation:
    • "Digital preservation is the set of processes, activities and management of digital information over time to ensure its long term accessibility. The goal of digital preservation is to preserve materials resulting from digital reformatting, and particularly information that is born-digital with no analog counterpart."

Draft questions

Survey Introduction

This survey is intended for institutions that currently preserve content in-house or plan to in the near future. Only one response should be submitted per institution.

Questions about the Institution

• At what kind of institution do you work? If your unit is part of a larger institution choose the larger entity. [Pull-down list: archive, historical society, library, museum, news organization, university, NEED MORE HERE, other]
• If you selected other, at what kind of institution do you work? [Free text box]
• Is preservation the principle mission of your organization? [radio button: yes, no]
  • (Not sure if we need this question if we only ask this to those preserving content, and we can infer their overall mission by the kind of institution it is)
• Approximately how many people work at your institution? Again if your unit is part of a larger institution provide a number for the larger entity. [Free text box]
• Approximately, how many terabytes of storage space do you require for all copies of your content that you manage? [Free text box]

Questions about Current Practices

• 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 at present?
  • selection
  • digitization and processing
  • metadata creation
  • creation of derivatives and access copies
  • deposit to storage
  • fixity checks
  • file format verification
  • auditing
  • migration
  • refreshing
  • emulation

• What are the major functions you wish to include in your organization's digital preservation work in the future?
  • selection
  • digitization and processing
  • metadata creation
  • creation of derivatives and access copies
  • deposit to storage
  • fixity checks
  • file format verification
  • auditing
  • migration
  • refreshing
  • emulation

• What skills do you think are necessary in the people who perform these functions?
• What educational background do you think is necessary to perform these functions?
• 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 much work experience, in years, do most of your digital preservation staff have?
• Do you have org charts, mission statements, position descriptions that you'd be willing to share?

Questions assessing the adequacy of Current Practice

• 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?
• Is your digitization setup right for you at the moment / Are you satisfied with what you have? (please feel free to edit this one)

Questions about the Ideal Practice

• 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)?