The Digital Preservation Coalition or DPC (https://www.dpconline.org/) is a membership organization, formed two decades ago and based in the UK, who’s vision is “…to secure our digital legacy.” To Achieve that vision, their mission is to, “…enable our members to deliver resilient long-term access to digital content and services, helping them to derive enduring value from digital assets and raising awareness of the strategic, cultural and technological challenges they face. We achieve our aims through advocacy, community engagement, workforce development, capacity-building, good practice and good governance.”
While based in the UK, the DPC has 33 full members and more than 100 associate members worldwide. The DPC makes a significant amount of its resources freely available, even to non-members. Their website has a particularly useful area, “Implement digital preservation” ( https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/implement-digipres), which includes among other tools the DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM), Digital Preservation Policy Toolkit and the topic of this posting, the EDRMS Preservation Toolkit (https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/implement-digipres/edrms-preservation-toolkit).
What is an EDRMS? It is an electronic document and records management system. They define a record keeping system “…as the manual or automated applications, policies and processes implemented to capture, organize, and categorize records. Record keeping systems support the management, access, retrieval, use, and disposition of records. They include both EDRMS [such as Hyland’s OnBase which Ohio State uses] and document-centric collaboration platforms such as SharePoint [Teams], Office365 [which is also used at Ohio State] and Google Drive.”
This Toolkit is constructed in an accessible manner for records novices and experts alike. The DPC define a record, as per the ISO 15489-1:2016 standard, as having to have content, context and structure; that contextual and structural information may be included in descriptive, rights, technical and/or administrative metadata; and that to be trusted they need to be authentic, reliable, have integrity and be usable.
The Toolkit discusses the preservation challenges that record keeping presents, and provides an in-depth examination of the preservation process that address topics amongst other: “Understanding the problem” to “Gathering the right team” to “Assessing the risks” and “Selecting a preservation approach.” It further provides a detailed analysis of the potential metadata to be captured. Finally, it speculates about the future of records preservation and provides a plethora of additional resources.
The DPC notes that, “The advice within this resource is intended to be broad enough to be applicable to any type or size of organization…whether they are a national archive, a business archive or a local record office and whether they are responsible for preserving records from a wide range of external sources or their own internal record keeping system/s.” As such I recommend this as a must read for those that lead the records management efforts within an organization, and/or those responsible for collecting and preserving records. Further, I would strongly encourage all organization personnel to peruse this as a means of understanding the basics of records management and preservation.
