CHIN Digital Preservation Case Study – 8th Hussars Museum

Using the Digital Preservation Toolkit

The basic steps to digital preservation include:

1. Taking stock of a museum’s digital inventory;
2. Producing a policy (i.e. what you want to do, and why);
3. Producing a plan (how you will do something); and
4. Developing procedures (the established protocols for carrying out a plan).

To take stock of a museum’s inventory, CHIN and the volunteers at 8^th Hussars Museum used the Digital Preservation Inventory Template to consider the risk and impact of losing access to digital resources. If the volunteers decided there was sufficient risk or impact to proceed, Nancy McGovern’s  Digital Preservation Policy Framework would next be used to draft a digital preservation policy. In turn, CHIN’s Digital Preservation Plan Framework would then be used to produce a plan, so that the policy could be carried out. Other documents were drawn into this process, including further resources in the toolkit, as well as some from the museum itself. The following is a summarization of the Digital Preservation Toolkit process.

Step 1 – Taking Stock of the Digital Inventory Held by the 8^th Hussars Museum

The printable version of the DP Toolkit’s Inventory template meets web page requirements. However, it became quickly evident during the October 2014 meeting with 8^th Hussars volunteers, that an Excel version of this template would be more useable. Fortunately, both CHIN and the Canadian Museum of History had been working on such a version, and this will be made available online. In the meantime, a copy of this template can be obtained by sending a request to pch.RCIP-CHIN.pch@canada.ca.

As can be seen from the table, Group 1 (digitized images) is the largest category, and it is what inspired 8^th Hussars to develop a digital preservation policy and plan.

During a presentation of this work to the Digital Preservation Discussion Group, it was noted that Group 2 (administrative documents) would generally not be part of the preservation procedures that are designed for cultural digital assets. However, CHIN included administrative documents in the recommended preservation plan and policy because smaller museums are unlikely to have a separate plan for the management of administrative materials, and because (as will be seen) there is little additional effort required to preserve these.

While carrying out this inventory activity, the following major issues were identified:

1. CDs were not archival quality, and were sometimes the only copy of a resource;
2. Where backups were made, they were not preservation copies;
3. The 3-2-1^{Footnote 3} and LOCKSS^{Footnote 4} rules needed to be implemented;
4. Refreshing media was not part of the existing process;
5. Data migration was not part of the existing process.; and
6. A regular backup procedure needed to be put into place, complete with preservation metadata.

Common Digital Preservation issues that were not found to be of concern included:

1. Many file formats appeared to be suitable for digital preservation;
2. Security was reasonable for the material being managed;
3. Storage environment was reasonable (although an offsite solution was required); and
4. There was no formal access policy, but for such a small institution, this would not appear to be an issue.

Step 2 – Drafting of a Digital Preservation Policy

CHIN used the framework provided by Nancy McGovern as a basis for a draft document, and it quickly became apparent that this framework was too detailed for a museum of this size. Nevertheless, the level of information provided piece of mind that no factor would be left unconsidered. All components of the framework were reviewed by CHIN, but only those relevant to the museum were used. Those of greatest interest were:

• Scope: The proposed scope of the policy was to provide access to all digital assets except administrative materials for an indefinite period. Group 2: administrative materials, would be kept for 7 years, unless there was important business value tied to a given document.

• Operating Principles: It was proposed that whatever procedures are put in place, they must not consume more time or resources than are already being used. While this makes a solution that fully observes OAIS (Open Archival Information Systems) model unlikely, several commonly observed digital preservation principles were retained. Namely:

  1. Digital content should be created with preservation in mind (eg: maintain some metadata relevant to preservation).
  2. Preservation copies of material should be made on a regular basis.
  3. An automated process should be used to create basic preservation metadata as preservation copies are made.
  4. Preservation copies should be kept on multiple forms of physical media, in multiple locations.
  5. Preservation copies should be periodically verified for data integrity.
  6. Physical media holding preservation copies should be refreshed to new media on a regular basis,
  7. Preservation copies should be migrated to new formats as required.
  8. Access to preservation copies should be limited to specific staff.

• Selection & Acquisition^{Footnote 5}: It was proposed that if a digital asset is unique and falls into any of the groups in the digital inventory (other than group 2) then it should be preserved indefinitely. Items in group 2 with business value should be preserved a minimum of 7 years. Anything else may also be preserved if it reduces effort (i.e. a “batch” process).

• Challenges & Risks: The greatest challenge identified was regarding limited resources. Secondly, there was a need for training, and CHIN has offered to help with this.

  In terms of risk, the greatest concern was regarding content that resides exclusively on read/write CDs. These needed to be moved to a more permanent physical carrier. There was also a risk of the unknown:  currently no standard exists for digital preservation in small museums, and thus whatever solution was chosen, it would involve a degree of uncertainty.

• Financial Sustainability: This was not deemed to be a risk, as the proposed solution required little or no additional financing.

• Technological & Procedural Stability: The template also called for an assessment of technological and procedural stability: i.e. how easy is it to maintain technology and procedures in the long-term. It is expected that both the technology and procedures would be kept simple (by necessity) in any final solution, but this component of the policy was left until such procedures were actually developed and approved.

The most recent draft of this policy is with the 8^th Hussars museum for their review.

Step 3 – Drafting of a Digital Preservation Plan

CHIN drafted a plan document for the 8^th Hussars museum based on the Digital Preservation Plan Framework found in the toolkit. The resulting Digital Preservation Plan is currently with the 8^th Hussars museum for approval.

Five solutions were considered, and a summary of these is presented here:

CHIN recommended Option 2. Options 3, 4 and 5 were ruled out given that:

• There is little advantage to the introduction of a quarantine machine into the museum’s current workflow;
• It is not realistic to expect a smaller museum to run its own OAIS-compliant archive; and
• There is currently no externally run OAIS-compliant archive that is both willing and able to take on the burden of guaranteeing long-term access to the museum’s digital assets for free.

Both Options 1 and 2 require little effort beyond what is already expended by museum volunteers, and both options improve immediate search-ability of high resolution images by indexing these in the archival database so that the database can be used as a search tool to retrieve these images.

Both Options 1 and 2 also improve the likelihood of long-term access by proposing multiple backups and offsite storage. However, without significantly more effort, Option 2 offers fixity checking; a best practice that helps verify that files have not changed since they were first preserved.

An interesting item in the details of option two was CHIN’s initial recommendation to use archival (gold) CD for one set of the preservation copies; this physical media is an archival standard. However, upon presenting the proposed solution to the Digitisation and Digital Preservation Discussion Groups, members questioned the wisdom of using a physical carrier that may soon be obsolete. The argument among digital archivists is that CDs in general are being replaced by cloud storage, and the hardware to access the CDs may soon go the way of the floppy drive. On the other hand there is a relevant difference between the two technologies; floppy disks were primarily used to store software, which was vulnerable to Moore’s “law”. As both hardware and software changed to keep pace with this law, the contents of floppy disks became obsolete. There was therefore no reason to read older disks once this physical carrier had been replaced. CDs however contain a form of content (music, movies, etc…) which remains valuable for longer periods of time, in spite of newer standards or more convenient ways of storing this content.

This debate remains unresolved, but for the sake of prudence and (as it turned out) simplicity, CHIN changed its recommendation to the use of external hard drives in lieu of archival CD. This contravenes the 3-2-1 Rule (i.e. keeping preservation copies on at least two physical formats), but it was considered the lower risk solution, and one that was easier to implement. Details of this recommendation can be found in the 8^th Hussars Digital Preservation Plan.