This project is a two year partnership (starting November 2018) between the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC).
The NDA is charged with the complicated task of decommissioning and cleaning the seventeen principal nuclear energy plants in the UK, a task accurately described as the largest and most important environmental restoration programme in Europe. The extended life cycle of the programme, set alongside robust commitments to security, integrity and safety, means the NDA approaches its work with a profound commitment to long-term information management, ensuring the right information is available to the right people in a format they can use and with the confidence that it can be trusted. Therefore, amongst its many challenges, the NDA is by default required to become a trusted leader for information management and digital preservation.
The project draws upon the experience of the DPC and its members to leverage good practice and to advise, guide and develop policy that will enable that the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to:
- access and secure critical legacy data and systems
- adapt current data and systems to ensure their long-term viability
- commission data and systems with long term resilience from the outset
Another important aim of the project is to inform, enhance and extend good practice and standards to benefit the DPC’s whole membership. With this in mind, many of the resources, outputs and findings from the project are being openly shared with the wider digital preservation community.
Resources
The following resources have been created by the project and are available for use by the wider digital preservation community:
- DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model - a new digital preservation maturity model for organisations with a need to preserve digital content for the long term.
- NDA Digital Preservation Policy (forthcoming)
Events
The work of the project was shared with the digital preservation community in the following events:
- DPC Rapid Assessment Model introductory webinar - a DPC Members-only webinar (11th September 2019)
- Achieving Criticality of Preservation Knowledge: Sustaining Digital Preservation in the Nuclear Field - a panel session at iPRES conference 2019 (18th September 2019)
- Benchmarking the DPC using RAM - a DPC Members-only webinar (12th December 2019) - Members can login in to view
- A year of digital preservation in a nuclear context - a DPC Members-only webinar (8th January 2020) - Members can login in to view
- Building a Digital Future : Challenges & Solutions for Preserving 3D Models - a DPC briefing day arising from one of the case studies presented by this project (30th April 2020)
Blogs
You can read more about the ongoing work of the project in the following blog posts:
- Digital Preservation in a Nuclear Context - the first six months (14th June 2019)
- A new maturity model for digital preservation (18th June 2019)
- Introducing the DPC RAM (20th September 2019)
- Celebrating World Digital Preservation Day (6th November 2019)
- How do you preserve records from within an EDRMS? (14th April 2020)
Looking ahead
Work will continue on this project until November 2020. Topics that are being investigated include:
- Preservation of Radioactive Waste Records
- Preservation of audiovisual archives
- Preservation of legacy databases
- Preservation of 3D digital engineering models
- Preservation of content held within an EDRMS
- Digitization