EuropeanaTravel has released Report on Digital Preservation Practice and Plans amongst LIBER Members with Recommendations for Practical Action.
Here's an excerpt:
As part of Work package 1 concerned with planning digitisation, a survey was designed to collect information about digital preservation practice and plans amongst all LIBER member libraries to inform future activity of LIBER’s Working Group on Preservation and Digital Curation. The survey focused on the digital preservation of digitised material.
The major findings are as follows:
- Some LIBER members have already been engaged in digitisation activities. The number of institutions with digitisation activities and the volume of digitised material are expected to grow further in the future.
- There is a mismatch between the perceived high value of digitised material and the frequent lack of a written policy/ procedure addressing the digital preservation of these collections. A number of the institutions without an according written policy stated they were working on developing and establishing one.
- Storage and development of tools are areas where considerable investments are made by the majority of institutions surveyed. Those are also the fields where many of the institutions face difficulties.
- Investments in staff assigned to digital preservation task are still inadequate at several institutions.
- Some digital preservation practices and basic integrity measurements are more widespread than others. More than half of the institutions which responded already have an archive dedicated to digitised collections in place, use preservation metadata standards and format restrictions to support preservation, have processes of bitstream preservation implemented and provide staff training in the area of digital preservation. One can identify a clear tendency that emulation strategy is less commonly used than migration and other migration supporting practices.
- Difficulties in establishing digital archives with a functioning preservation system, the frequent lack of institutional strategies concerning digitisation and digital preservation and funding problems seem to be amongst the most serious problems faced by LIBER members.
