Digital Preservation Coalition

Assessing long term access from short term digitization projects

Appropriate and timely examination of the digital preservation plans of digitization projects can have a lasting impact.  Projects may not know or understand the risks they run. Simple assessment can help them identify and address these risks sooner rather than later.

Digitization projects often - and sensibly - start by establishing and meeting the needs of a modern user community and are mostly funded over a short term.  But the outputs from digitization projects are likely to be valuable in the long term, so how can we take steps to make the outputs of digitization robust in the long term?  This case note reports some work undertaken by the University of London Computer Centre in assessing the long term plans of 16 digitization projects, providing a basic survey tool to help funders and project managers alike to relfect on the long term preservation plans.

Full Text of Case Note now available here [pdf]