Completed projects

In 2020-1 the Digital Preservation Coalition engaged in a project with The National Archives and the University of Warwick to establish a collaborative approach to manage digital preservation risk and bring statistical risk management methods into the digital heritage sphere.

Safeguarding the Nation’s Digital Memory created a structured evidence base to map and explain risk and developed a tool (DiAGRAM - the Digital Archives Graphical Risk Assessment Model) to enable archivists to prioritise threats and select suitable actions to mitigate them.

The FAIR Forever study was commissioned by the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Sustainability Working Group and funded by the EOSC Secretariat in 2020 (grant agreement number 831644) to assess the current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to the preservation of research data across EOSC, and the feasibility of establishing shared approaches, workflows and services that would benefit EOSC stakeholders.

The DPC examined the challenges addressed, and results of, the second phase of the Jisc Research Data Spring projects. It provided recommendations on how the work can be enhanced from a digital preservation perspective prior to the projects continuing on towards a third and final development phase in early 2016. Visit the Jisc Research Data Spring Long Term Preservation Analysis and Recommendations wiki for more information.

TIMBUS was a research project co-funded by the European Commission. It addressed the challenge of digital preservation of business processes and services to ensure their long-term continued access. TIMBUS analysed and recommended which aspects of a business process should be preserved and how to preserve them. It delivered methodologies and tools to capture and formalise business processes on both technical and organisational levels. This included their underlying software and hardware infrastructures and dependencies on third-party services and information. TIMBUS aligned digital preservation with well-established methods for enterprise risk management (ERM), feasibility and cost-benefit analysis, and business continuity management (BCM). Visit the TIMBUS website for more information.

Project highlights:

• A Risk Management Approach to Preservation of Business Processes explores the application of risk assessment to the digital preservation of business processes.

APARSEN was a Network of Excellence funded by the European Commission, which ran from January 2011 to December 2014. DPC had responsibility for the 'APARSEN Training' work package and had a range of interests in other elements of the network. During the course of the project the DPC coordinated 6 training events, including 2 week-long summer schools. Visit the APARSEN website for more information.

• Report - APARSEN, 2012. D43.1 Survey for the Asssessment of Training Material/Assessment of Digital Curation Requirements.

4C - the 'Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation' was aimed at helping organisations across Europe invest more effectively in digital curation and preservation. Research in digital preservation and curation has tended to emphasise the cost and complexity of the task in hand. 4C reminded us that the point of this investment is to realise a benefit. With this in mind the 4C research encompassed related concepts such as ‘risk’, ‘value’, ‘quality’ and ‘sustainability’ leading to the conclusion that organisations that understand this will be more able to effectively control and manage their digital assets over time, but they may also be able to create new cost-effective solutions and services for others. Visit the 4C website for more information.

Project highlights:

• The 4C Roadmap: an outline of the steps that should be taken in the 5 years leading up to 2020, in order to maximise the efficiency of digital curation.
• Curation Costs Exchange: Understanding and comparing digital preservation costs to support smarter investments.