The Digital Curation Centre has released DCC Methodology for Designing and Evaluating Curation and Preservation Experiments V1.0.
Here's an excerpt:
The purpose of this document is to describe a Digital Curation Centre (DCC) testbed methodology which will serve as a workflow framework for designing experiments to validate the effectiveness of curation and preservation strategies. The methodology is grounded in the following general principles: the methodology must
- conform to the fundamental standards of a scientific methodology,
- be easy to follow and implement, i.e. accommodate experimenters of all levels of technical expertise,
- be general enough to accommodate future changes and the evolution of ideas in curation and
- preservation theory and practice,
- be specific enough to provide concrete guidance in the immediate short term,
- be sufficiently flexible and extensible to allow for technological advances and the evolving
- complexity of available resources