World Digital Preservation Day and Minimum Viable Preservation - Arkivum

Archiving & Preservation / 29 Nov, 2018

World Digital Preservation Day and Minimum Viable Preservation

Happy World Digital Preservation Day!

World Digital Preservation Day (formerly International Digital Preservation Day) pioneered by the Digital Preservation Coalition is held on the last Thursday of every November with the goal to bring the digital preservation community together to celebrate the collections preserved, the access maintained and the understanding fostered by preserving digital materials.

The aim of the day is to create greater awareness of digital preservation that will translate into a wider understanding which permeates all aspects of society – business, policy making, personal good practice.

In preparation for the day we wrote a blog on the DPC website around what constitutes “Minimum Viable Preservation”

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a common term in the tech sector to describe something that has just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development. A similar term ‘Minimal Viable Preservation’ came up in discussion at iPRES this year.

Many organisations have a large volume of digital material that needs some form of basic treatment to ‘stabilise it’ from a preservation point of view pending more detailed action to be taken in the future (when budgets and resources permit). This is just like a product MVP – just enough to satisfy initial preservation needs and giving an understanding of what’s needed in the future.

In many cases I suspect this ‘basic treatment’ might be all the attention that some content will get. The best laid intentions today of ‘further action’ in the future can often become lost in the deluge of new content and new challenges that institutions face when that future arrives. That’s why some form of Minimal Viable Preservation done today can be so important – especially when automated and made cost-effective at scale so it can be applied as a matter of routine – and we all know that if something isn’t routine then there’s the very real chance that it won’t get done at all!

See the full blog on the DPC website

If you want to find out more about how we support organisations with Digital Preservation get in touch

Matthew Addis

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