Significance 2.0: a guide to assessing the significance of collection

Significance 2.0: a guide to assessing the significance of collections. Roslyn Russell, Kylie Winkworth. Collections Council of Australia Ltd. 2009.
This guide is for defining an adaptable method for determining significance across all collections in Australia. The intention is that it will improve collection decision-making in areas such as, preservation, access, and funding support. Regarding significance:

• We cannot keep everything forever. It is vital we make the best use of our scarce resources for collecting, conserving, documenting and digitising our collection materials.
• Significance is not an absolute state; it can change over time.  
• Collection custodians have a responsibility to consult communities and respect other views in constructing societal memory and identity. 
• It is vital to understand, respect and document the context of collection materials that shape collection materials.

Significance’ refers to the values and meanings that items and collections have for people and communities. Significance helps unlock the potential of collections, creating opportunities for
communities to understand, access and enjoy collections. Artistic, scientific and social or
spiritual values are the criteria or key values that help to express how and why an item or collection is significant. Part of the criteria are: provenance, rarity or representativeness, condition or completeness, and interpretive capacity. Significance assessment involves five main steps:

1. analysing an item or collection
2. researching its history, provenance and context
3. comparison with similar items
4. understanding its values by reference to the criteria
5. summarising its meanings and values in a statement of significance

 A statement of significance is a concise summary of the values, meaning and importance of an item
or collection. It is an argument about how and why an item or collection is of value. This should be reviewed as circumstances change.  Significance assessment is

• a process to help with good management of items and collections; 
• it is a collaborative process and consultation is essential.
• it will substantiate justify assessments objectively rather than subjectively

The process is:

1. Collate information about the history and development of the collection
2. Research the history, scope and themes of the collection
3. Consult knowledgeable people
4. Explore the context of the collection
5. Analyse and describe the condition of the collection
6. Compare the collection with similar collections
7. Identify related places and collections
8. Assess significance against the criteria
9. Write a statement of significance
10. List recommendations and actions

Significance assessment is only the first part of the significance process. Once an item or collection has been assessed as significant, there will be a range of actions to better manage the collections.
 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Preserving progress for future generations

Preserving progress for future generations. Rebecca Pool. Research Information. February/March 2015.
Digital preservation remains one of the most critical challenges facing scholarly communities today. From e-journals and e-books to emails, blogs and more, electronic content is proliferating and organizations worldwide are trying to preserve information before the electronic information is lost. Some of the organizations include: Portico (which preserves content on behalf of participating publishers; the number of open access journals it includes is rising, ); CLOCKSS (still grappling with the cost models of providing preservation service).

There is a rising demand for the preservation of dynamic content. No one is able to "capture dynamic content and [preserve] a day-to-day, or even, minute-to-minute feed of this content." There are only snapshots. CLOCKSS is developing the ‘how to’ process to preserve these ‘snapshots’ across multiple locations, validating each against the other, and is also exploring the best pricing structures to preserve such content.

Other organizations include LOCKSS, The Digital Preservation Network, HathiTrust, Preservica, Archivematica, and Rosetta, whose recent clients are the State Library of New South Wales and the State Library of Queensland.

The digital preservation development is clearly gaining momentum, growing in both size and complexity. "Clearly progress is being made and you can measure that by the maturity of solutions on offer." But for most organizations, the urgency of digital preservation has yet to hit home.

"Trying to sell the idea of digital preservation on the basis of return on investment has been very hard. By its nature, it’s a long-term activity and you’re really hedging your bets against future risks. I think we are still in the very early days of genuinely understanding the value of digital assets... and transferring this understanding over to financial assets doesn’t yet work very well." The European consortium 4C (Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation) has been investigating this problem. Their road map helps organisations appraise digital assets, adopt a strategy to grow preservation assets and develop costing processes. In addition they have developed a model for curation costs. The only way to understand the costs of preservation is though sharing, through openness and collaboration.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Audio Preservation at MIT: an NDSR Project Update.

Digital Audio Preservation at MIT: an NDSR Project Update. Susan Manus, Tricia Patterson. Library of Congress; The Signal. January 16, 2015.
Report of the residency position, in which Tricia is primarily tasked with: completing a gap analysis of the digital preservation workflows currently in place for audio streaming and preservation, and developing lower-level diagrammatic and narrative workflows. [Workflow images are in the article.] Workflow documentation is receiving increased acknowledgement and appreciation in the preservation environment. The reasons:

• tested, repeatable road map allows processing of larger projects with efficiency and security
• detailed workflows show redundancies and deficiencies in processes across departments
• workflow documents clarify roles and accountability within the chain of custody.

The benefits include getting a better idea of what digitization project documentation is generated and that the documentation needs to be preserved as well. It has also helped identify steps that would benefit from automation.The process started with itemizing 50-60 delivery requirements, including relevant TRAC requirements (PDF), covering display and interface, search and discovery, accessibility, ingest and export, metadata, content management, permissions, documentation and other considerations. From there requirements were prioritized on a scale from “might be nice” to “must-have.” The next step is to measure options against our prioritized requirements to determine the needs of the Libraries now. An important part is to provide meaningful access to the audio treasures in the library.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Aligning Customer Needs: Business Process Management (BPM) and Successful Change Management in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections

Aligning Customer Needs: Business Process Management (BPM) and Successful Change Management in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections. Joseph Gordon Daines III. Library Leadership & Management. November 2014. PDF
A lot of archival processing happens before an archival or manuscript collection can be made available for research use by patrons. It is central to the archival endeavor. This article looks at the role of business process management (BPM) in automating many of the workflows used to manage the manuscript and archival collections

BPM is a field of management focused on aligning organizations with the needs and wants of their customer bases. The Special Collections department identified its customer bases as its curatorial staff and its patrons. Enabling the curatorial staff to more efficiently prepare manuscript collections for research use would also enable better customer service. Several different BPM techniques were used to gain an understanding of the curatorial needs of  the department as it automated the  workflows. This enabled the department to successfully simplify and streamline its workflows during the course of automating them. The end result has been more efficient processing of archival collections and better service for our patrons.

A review of the requirements showed a need for two types of functionality:

1. task management, and 
2. archival content management.

Business process:

• Systematic management, measurement and improvement of all company processes through cross-functional teamwork and employee empowerment.
• Standardize activities and processes in order to improve organizational efficiency
• Business process: “a series of interrelated activities, crossing functional boundaries, with specific inputs and outputs.”
• The tools that will be examined are process mapping, process modeling, statements of work, and use cases. Processes are modeled using at least one of the following charts: general process charts, process flow diagrams, process activity charts, or flowcharts.
• Flowcharts are useful in identifying decision points and parallel activities in a process.gain an understanding of the sequence of activities in the process
• Statements of Work: A specific statement regarding the requirements needed in a service contract. The statement of work should include all aspects of job requirements, performance and assessment.
• Use cases also help identify the actors involved in various activities and what they want from those activities. For the purposes of use cases, actors are defined as “anything that interfaces with your system—for example, people, other software, hardware devices, data stores, or networks. Each actor defines a particular role.” Use cases typically include two components—a diagram featuring the actor(s) and how they interact with the system and a flow of events statement. The flow of events statement is “a series of declarative statements listing the steps of a use case from the actor’s point of view.”
• ProcessMaker provides a SOW template that aided the project in automating the workflow comprising the department’s implementation of the archival business process.
• The use of BPM tools and techniques in the Perry Special Collections provided the department with a methodology to examine and improve the workflow used to provide access to archival materials.
• Business processes enable leaders to make informed decisions that can improve library’s abilities to deliver their services. 
• BPM tools are not difficult to use and provide a wide range of benefits. Library leaders should use BPM tools to lead successful change initiatives.
  

Digital Preservation Matters.