Meeting the Digital Preservation Needs of Smaller Organizations
Jefferson Bailey
The practice of digital preservation tends to be well-established at larger institutions such as academic research libraries, governments and NGOs, and other well-resourced organizations. However, in aggregate the bulk of cultural heritage materials, including those in digital form, are held by the tens of thousands of smaller organizations dedicated to preserving local memory collections such as public libraries, historical societies, regional museums, and community archives. These smaller organizations are also more focused on preserving the lives and accomplishments of everyday citizens and local history -- collection building that greatly diversifies the archival record well beyond the institutional self-documentation or collections of famous/entitled people that tend to characterize the collections of larger organizations. Since 1996, Internet Archive (IA) has worked with over 1,500 organizations both big and small to provide digital archiving and preservation services, tools, expertise, advocacy, training and open-source technologies. In 2023, IA launched the Vault digital preservation service to better meet the needs of institutions, including smaller ones, that require an affordable, extensible, mission-aligned, non-profit digital preservation service option. In this paper/presentation, we will outline the many lessons learned from extensive discussion, research, needs assessment, and practical experience, both from the perspective of the institutions themselves and from the perspective of building a non-profit software-as-a-service platform that aims to meet the needs of the smaller LAM community. The paper will detail findings on the various challenges of doing digital preservation at smaller organizations, including financial/budgetary realities, issues of staffing and policy, technology capacity limitations, and overall program management and sustainability challenges. The paper will then describe how these challenges were addressed in product development, cost modeling, and community cultivation in building a digital preservation service that incorporates these findings into its service design. Finally, the paper will propose various strategies for digital preservation practices and community building to be more inclusive of smaller organizations and ways that the larger community can collectively empower smaller organizations to help advance the global digital preservation effort.
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