Digital Preservation Coalition

Institutional Strategies - Outreach

Promotional activities are becoming an increasingly important aspect of the business of cultural institutions in general. In terms of digital preservation, there are compelling reasons to engage in an active awareness-raising campaign and programme of outreach activities:

• Preservation is heavily dependent on data creators, funders, and other stakeholders and their actions early in the lifecycle.
• Outreach is cost-effective if it reduces or eliminates the need for retrospective construction of documentation, rights clearance, file reformatting to a technology neutral format, and other resource intensive interventions by archiving institutions.
• Both the increasing importance of digital information and the need to retain significant digital resources over time need to be actively promoted.
• Awareness raising of the challenges associated with ensuring digital preservation is needed.
• Awareness raising of the resource implications is needed.
• Roles and responsibilities need to be established.
• The overall understanding of the many and varied issues needs to be improved.
• The prospects for effective collaboration based on shared understanding of the issues will be improved.

There is a basic conundrum in attempting to communicate about digital preservation issues.While the overall approach to digital preservation is based on common sense and sound business practices, the subtleties and interdependencies of many of the issues makes it difficult to convey them. Added to this is the current work environment of information overload in which staff have neither the time nor the inclination to undertake research into current trends and master highly technical material.

The combination of these factors makes the danger of misunderstandings far greater in the digital environment. An effective outreach strategy can do much to minimise this danger. As with Collaboration, a high initial investment of resources is likely to yield considerable long-term benefits.The web provides both the incentive and a useful means to promote outreach activities and a number of organisations have made good use of it to disseminate information on digital preservation.

See Exemplars and Further Reading