Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation

In September 2009 the Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation released an English summary of the Dutch National Digital Preservation Survey, held in 2009. During the course of the survey they spoke with many different groups from three different sectors (government, research community, and the private sector). Many of the issues that they identified we have already seen so far in this class, but I appreciated the insight in steps towards solutions they came up with.

One problem identified was a shortage of knowledge on just how to perform digital curation. The approach of one group in the study to solve this problem was to set up a forum for exchange of knowledge and expertise. Another approach (and one that has seen some development in the USA government) is the appointment of chief information officers (CIOs) for government institutions.

Another problem was the shortage of tools: on the international tools projects such as PLANETS, Caspar Preserves and PrestoPRIME were all being developed with EU funding. Although not finished, the idea here is to create toolboxes for smaller institutions that don’t have preservation as a main concern, so they can still maintain custody of their files.

As we have seen before, another common problem is the hangover from pre-online publication. Permanent access, or cradle-to-grave custodianship, is called the “records continuum” in the Dutch model. Since the producers of digital information don’t recognize the long-term concern of curation as their own and are instead concerned with publishing to the public, project plans must provide provisions in how to provide long-term access, beyond just simple funding requirements. This would include dedicated selection mechanisms spelled out in the project plans with support in the data creation phase from data management professionals. This is a good way to avoid placing the burden strictly upon the researchers and if done correctly could even enhance research.

One side concern that I found interesting was the possibility of outsourcing file storage to commercial groups to use scale advantages. This has a lot of associated concerns we haven’t looked at yet. There are a lot of fascinating projects going on in the Netherlands, including “Images for the Future”, an audio-visual digitization project with collaboration from six groups that has a budget of 154 million € and will be tackling tens of thousands of hours of video, audio, and millions of photos over the next six years.