The follow up paper describing my recently completed preservation project, is now ready for submission to the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC). I’m hoping that, since they published my paper describing how I derived the Preservation Planning Templates in the first place, they might be interested in taking a paper describing how they have been used in practice. We’ll see. In any case it’s good to have been able to create a summarised account of what happened while its fresh in my mind.

Writing the first draft of the paper only took about a week. However, that piece of work made me realise that the details of what got done when, appears in five main documents – the paper I was writing, the Scoping document, the Plan DESCRIPTION, the Plan CHART, and section 2 of the Preservation Maintenance Plan (Previous preservation actions taken); and that the base data for all these documents was being derived from the three major controls sheets – the DROID analysis spreadsheet, the Files-that-won’t-open spreadsheet, and the Physical Disks spreadsheet. Although the facts were roughly consistent across the documents, there were several anomalies that would be apparent to readers, and the sheer number of files and types of conversions that had been performed made it difficult to check and make revisions. I decided that the only way to achieve true consistency and traceability across all the documents would be to specify columns in the control spreadsheets for all the categories I wanted to describe, and to have the spreadsheets add up the counts automatically.  This is what I spent the following two weeks doing – and a very slow and tortuous exercise it was. Which is why the paper makes several mentions of the need to set up control sheets correctly in the first place to facilitate downstream needs for control and for statistical information about what’s been done….

I was given a lot of very useful feedback on the drafts of the paper by Ross Spencer, including suggestions to include a summary timeline for the project at the beginning of the paper, to provide more details about the DROID tool, and to include some additional references.  Ross also advised making it clear that this is a personal collection with preservation decisions being made that the owners were comfortable with; and that different decisions might have been made by other people from the perspective of who the future users of the Collection might be. This prompted me to include an extra paragraph in the Conclusions section to the effect that no attempt has been made to convert some files (such as old versions of the Indexing software, or a Visio stencil file) because they don’t have content and their mere presence in the collection tell their own story. However, it’s got me thinking that there is a wider point here about what collections are for, and just how much detail of the digital form needs to be preserved. I’ll probably explore this issue further in the Personal Document Management topic in this Blog.

Writing the paper also prompted me to realise that, unfortunately, my Digital Preservation Journey can’t be completed until I’ve tested out the application of a Preservation Maintenance Plan. It’s one thing to fill in a Maintenance Plan (which was relatively quick and easy), but quite another to have it initiate and direct a full blown Preservation project. Only by using it in practice will it be known if it is an effective and useful tool; and, no doubt, its use will lead to some refinements being made to its contents. I shall explore whether I could use the Maintenance Plans I produced for photos and for mementos which were created in the course of the trials conducted when putting together the first versions of the Preservation Planning Templates. If they won’t provide an adequate test, I’ll have to wait until the date specified in the PAWDOC Preservation Maintenance Plan for the next Maintenance exercise – September 2021.