The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
What have been effective ways that you or your organization has used to communicate the value of doing a risk (or risk/value) assessment for digital collections? I'm interested in energizing groups to act to preserve their digital holdings but would like a more effective approach to communicating the importance of specific action for specific digital materials.
MGallinger
I have not done a formal risk assessment at my current organization, but the subject comes up regularly through budget talks, meetings and long-term planning. David Rosenthal researches this topic along with the economics of digital storage - I always find his work a good resource.
Specifically, Requirements for Digital Preservation Systems (2005, Rosenthal et al.) has a taxonomy of threats section that helps (me, at least) go over risks a digital collection is exposed to:
You could present this list to your audience and ask them to engage on a few of them - if they can attach numbers to any of those threat types, along with helpful actions, all the better.
The paper also covers economic risks from a number of angles - as it argues:
Information in digital form is much more vulnerable to interruptions in the money supply than information on paper.
Honestly though this is a problem I face myself in training government records producers - it can be tough to communicate these risks in a powerful way. Sometimes I show them some a corrupted image file for some quick attention!
This is a very narrow slice of digital preservation risks, but it's a good visual approach that can make an impact. Euan Cochrane put together a comparison of how software render files differently.
Here are some of his visuals depicting rendering differences and here is the full report (.pdf).
A few people have called on students to find and document more real-world rendering problems. This can help communicate the difficulty of born-digital problems very effectively, much like the Stanford scanning defects reference.
Take a digital copy of a valuable piece of paper. Print it out in high resolution. Next... To show bitrot, punch a few holes in it. To show compression, wrinkle it into a ball, unwrap it and straighten it out.
This humorous way always gets the discussion going.
It is important to build an understanding of risk in a more formal context, from the ground up through training courses, such as M_o_R: http://www.mor-officialsite.com/ or other such courses that teach the ISO standards etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_31000
It is important not to simply assert 'risk' but actually give staff the ability to think critically about it, involve them by getting them to think of the importance of digital preservation within the organisation and the threats to the organization and its objectives - it is important not to forget about opportunities too!
Taking walker's example further, courses would enable staff to come up with their own lists of threats from the obvious to novel, and also help iron out perceived risks in favor of those that can be written clearly and then measured.
In my former role we did an M_o_R course with staff and managers there. It provides everyone with a language to talk about risk thus improving everyone's ability to communicate.
There were some simple exercises which helped explain how to make a risk statement, what documents were important and how to go about establishing a risk management culture. In learning that it is an evolutionary process and you won't simply leave the room doing 'risk management' we learnt that there were some small exercises we could begin with as a team that would act as a beginning and might evolve into something more.
We left the room to begin work on restating a risk-register using a more formal structure [Cause. Event. Effect] - [Because of... There is a risk that... Which will result in...]. In learning small things like that could automatically improve how we worked there was an immediate energizing effect (and grounding effect too in some cases!).
The principles above are very general, and can apply across the organisation and discipline.
In a digital preservation context the additional structure more formal approaches can put around statements like the importance of specific action for specific digital materials - can help everyone to see whether the digital materials are at risk or not, what the impact is, and the range of responses you might take as a group to handle that risk. It improves accountability, communication, cooperation and understanding throughout the management chain through to the staff.