Digital Preservation Coalition releases new version of Rapid Assessment Model

In March this year, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has updated their Rapid Assessment Model (RAM) to version 3.0.

The DPC RAM is a digital preservation maturity assessment tool, to help organisations plan and assess their digital preservation capability in line with industry good practice. The easy-to-use tool can be applied to organisations of all sizes, from any industry and can be accessed freely from the DPC website.

Arkivum has previously written a blog post on the various maturity assessment tools available, which you can read here. We have also included the DPC RAM in our data integrity eBook, which mapped the ALCOA+ principles to various maturity assessment models.

What is new in version 3.0?

A major focus for the new version is incorporating ethical considerations throughout the guidance, particularly within the original ‘Legal Basis’ capability. This has now been expanded to ‘Legal and ethical’, drawing on members feedback and expertise in Indigenous data sovereignty and the de-colonization of archives particularly in Australasia and Asia-Pacific.

Paul Wheatley, Head of Research and Practice for the DPC is quoted on the change:

“As a community we’ve made great steps in recognising the importance of not just the technical but also the organizational challenges in digital preservation, but have we fully recognised the human and ethical perspectives in our work?”

 “In the previous version of the model we introduced some minor changes relating to ethical concerns, but we were aware that more work was needed in this area to incorporate some of the well-established and comprehensive good practice guidance that is available. And so for version 3, we’ve conducted a much more thorough review in this area.”

Another area of change within the update is improvements for how to visualise progress and changes over time. Many organisations use DPC RAM to improve their digital preservation capability, and the new version of the RAM enables users to better visualise results over time.

To further support organisational improvement, the DPC has also included a new template to help users create a ‘forward plan’.

You can read the full new announcement on the DPC website here.

About the DPC

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is a registered company (Registered no: 4492292) and charity (Charity no. SC051077).

We are a membership organisation, managed by a small team of full time staff and overseen by a Board of Directors appointed from our Full Members. Our primary function is to deliver on behalf of our members.  We were established in 2002 as a collaboration between a number of agencies operating in the UK and Ireland.  Although our program and our membership has changed a lot since 2002, we remain true to the founding principles of community oversight described in our Articles of Association and Memorandum of Incorporation.  The majority of our income is still derived from the annual subscriptions which members pay: and our workplan is scrutinised and approved by our members annually.

Arkivum is a proud supporter of the DPC.