In researching the report detailed interviews we taken with several large broadcast archives. These form the basis of much of the analysis we’ll be exploring in this tutorial. However much these archives may vary in the detail of their approach though, at the highest level of their planning there is a striking similarity in the approach taken.
Archives tend to take a two level approach to planning:
- Firstly, they define their high-level preservation strategy. This defines what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by and how much it will cost in total.
- Secondly, they then consider the operational aspects of preservation, by focussing on the details of how preservation will be done on a day-to-day basis.
At the first level there are two key questions asked:
- What have you got? This includes the content itself, the media upon which it’s stored, the condition of those media, the storage facilities and the metadata systems upon which access depends.
- What are your priorities? These depend on both business and technical factors.
The answers to these top level questions, and their analysis with tools the Prestospace project is developing, will allow an archive to define its overall preservation strategy, and an overall, multi year plan defining the targets of migration t digital formats. The operational implementation of that strategy depends upon the second level though.
At the operational layer year by year, fully costed plans for the progress of the migration are made. For the work itself the appropriate framework documents are produced, such as Service Level Agreements (SLAs) if using outside contractors to conduct the work, or investment plans and total cost of ownership (TCO) assessments if the decision is made to conduct the work in-house.
In a nutshell, that is what the report and this tutorial cover. You can continue on to our next section looking at the overall factors that are key in preservation planning, or use the menu to explore the rest of the tutorial.
