Start by creating a map of your organization or the product/service you are focused on for carbon footprint calculation. It is particularly important to understand your organizational boundaries and identify the points where content and hardware enters and leaves your care, as this will define the scope of your carbon footprint calculations.
To get you started, we’ve created a generic model that is aligned with the service capabilities of DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model (RAM):
A high-level functional service map of a generic digital archive (see the text below for a fuller description of each of the elements that make up this map)
The purple boxes in the diagram above represent the preservation services you provide and are aligned to the five service capabilities of DPC RAM. Some archives perform all these functions in-house and some will use cloud-based service providers to manage certain workflows or for storage. The way these functions are performed will impact the way you gather data in the next step. The contents of each box are unpacked further below.
Upstream activities
Content Provider:
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Activities you may carry out within this section that will have a carbon footprint include: content creation, digitization, metadata, delivery via FTP, web serving.
Hardware Manufacturer:
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The manufacture of hardware that is used for digital preservation activities.
Digital preservation activities (aligned with DPC RAM)
Acquisition, Transfer and Ingest:
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In DPC RAM this is described as ’Processes to acquire or transfer content and ingest it into a digital archive’.
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Activities you may carry out within this section that will have a carbon footprint include: donation and depositor management, contracts and billing, pre-ingest appraisal, authentication, downloading, file transfer services, integrity checking, web crawling, unpacking, appraising, file identification, virus checking, ingest, copy backup, normalizing, extraction of metadata, transforming, re-appraisal.
Bitstream Preservation:
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In DPC RAM this is described as ‘Processes to ensure the storage and integrity of digital content to be preserved’.
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Activities you may carry out within this section that will have a carbon footprint include: content storage (in multiple locations), integrity checking, repair of corrupt files.
Content Preservation:
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In DPC RAM this is described as ‘Processes to preserve the meaning, usability and functionality of the digital content over time’.
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Activities you may carry out within this section that will have a carbon footprint include: file format identification, file format validation, creation of preservation metadata, testing and quality checking of preservation actions, logging and monitoring, system analytics, file format migration, emulation, reporting.
Metadata management:
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In DPC RAM this is described as ‘Processes to create and maintain sufficient metadata to support preservation, discovery and use of preserved digital content’.
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Activities you may carry out within this section that will have a carbon footprint include: the extraction, creation, management, storage, updating, and supplying of metadata.
Discovery and Access:
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In DPC RAM this is described as ‘Processes to enable discovery of digital content and provide access for users’.
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Activities you may carry out within this section that will have a carbon footprint include: preparation of access copies, content management system, servers, user interface, search, advanced access and visualization tools, load balancer, public access terminals, helpdesk, user analytics, virtual exhibitions, access statistics and reporting.
Downstream activities
Content delivery network:
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A distributed service that provides rapid and reliable access to content depending on the location of users so that Internet traffic is managed and users have similar access irrespective of distance. They can be used for all manner of content but are particularly associated with on-demand streaming media and social media platforms.
End Users:
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Equipment in use by the users of the digital content (e.g., desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets), bots and AI, printing, saving to USB for onward use.