Back in February, work started on the draft Scoping Document for the digital preservation actions required on the PAWDOC collection. Having spent some months actually doing bits of the work identified in the document and refining the document with the insights gained in the process, the final version of the Scoping Document has now been completed. It includes the following list of things that have to be done before a Project Plan can be produced:

• Decide what document management system or alternative, and any associated databases, are to be used going forward.
• Decide if Filemaker is to be retained as the platform for the Index or if it is to be replaced going forward.
• Establish the future platform strategy.
• Research and understand the actions required to:
  • make any moves planned from one piece of software to another; or from one platform to another;
  • be able to open those documents that don’t currently open;
  • promote the long term accessibility and survivability of all categories of document in the collection;
  • mitigate against the collection’s CDs and DVDs becoming unreadable;
  • mitigate against the electronic part of the collection being separated from the physical part.

Unfortunately Jan Hutar and Ross Spencer have decided they are unable to make any further substantial contributions to the project due to time pressures and other reasons. However, I continue to hope that they will remain associated with the work and be prepared to answer questions by email as needed. Their input to the early part of the work has been invaluable in getting the project to the point where I am actively investigating the practicalities of moving the electronic documents out of the Fish document management system into flat files in a Windows directory. The Fish supplier has a utility which will perform such a transformation, but much will depend on whether it can be customised to produce the file title format required and how much it will cost.

Alongside this activity, work continues on files that can’t be opened and on issues identified by the DROID analysis. Given the position that the project is in at present I would anticipate being able to complete the project plan sometime in the next 9 – 12 months.