November 2021 – NDSA Blog

Announcing Member Contact Update Form and Update on Membership Status

NDSA membership contacts are the main point of contact if questions arise about the NDSA membership. These people also receive emails about the annual Coordinating Committee election and any other official correspondence the NDSA Leadership may have. To help keep these contacts up to date, the NDSA has been working on developing a way for organizations to let us know when their Program Representative or Authorized Signatory contact needs to be updated. We have developed a form for you to fill out to provide us with correct information.

To assist NDSA with managing memberships, emails from contacts that bounce back more than once from organizations with multiple contacts will be automatically removed from the membership contact list. Effort will be made to reach out to organizations without multiple contacts that have emails bouncing back, however if no response is received NDSA reserves the right to remove this organization from the current membership list until such time as the organization is able to provide new contacts.

If you would like to know who your contacts are please reach out to ndsa.digipres [at] gmail.com and we will be happy to provide you with that information.

This information, instructions, and the form are also available on the Member Orientation webpage. There is also a link to the form on the Join the NDSA webpage.

~ The NDSA Leadership Team

It’s here, the 2021 NDSA Staffing Survey!

Do you work at an organization that stewards digital content for long-term preservation? If so, we’d like to hear from you about staffing for digital preservation at your organization. The 2021 NDSA Staffing Survey is designed to gain insight into current and ideal staffing for digital preservation programs.

The 2021 Staffing Survey is meant to be answered by individuals and there is no limit on the number of individual respondents per organization. Responses are sought from individuals worldwide with current digital preservation responsibilities at their organization, ranging from practitioners to department managers to senior leadership. You do not need to be an NDSA member to answer this survey.

Follow this link to access the survey. It is available until Friday, December 10, 2021 and is expected to take approximately 20-25 minutes to complete. To assist with completing the survey, a PDF preview of all of the survey questions can be viewed in advance by following this link.

The 2021 survey has undergone an extensive redesign from the earlier 2012 and 2017 iterations, prompted by findings from the last survey and changes in the field over the last decade. During this process, the Staffing Survey Working Group aimed to ensure that all participants would see themselves reflected in the answer choices. While the survey is not exhaustive, we believe it strikes a balance. However, we welcome all feedback about how future instances of the survey can be improved, and encourage participants to submit their comments at the survey’s end.

Interested in the results of previous NDSA staffing reports? The code books, data, and reports are available in the NDSA OSF.

If you have questions or concerns about this survey, please contact ndsa.digipres@gmail.com and include “Staffing Survey” in the subject line.

Thank you for helping NDSA and our community define and advance digital preservation!

-The NDSA Staffing Survey Working Group

Results of the 2021 Fixity Survey and Fixity Case Studies

The 2021 Fixity Survey Working Group is pleased to announce the publication of the results of the 2021 Fixity Survey and corresponding Fixity Case Studies. The 40 question survey was completed by 116 respondents over a month long period.

The Report documents the results of each question in the areas of 1) basic information about fixity practices, 2) how fixity is being used, 3) fixity in relation to cloud services, 4) fixity errors, and 5) general demographic information.

Several key points can be made from studying the survey results, some of which are listed below with more details provided in the report.

The results demonstrate just how important fixity information is to the digital preservation community, with over 96% of survey respondents confirming that they utilize fixity information within their organization and over 98% of these using checksums (sometimes alongside other types of fixity information). The primary reason fixity information is used by the community is to determine whether data has been altered over time.
Despite a clear consensus that the use of fixity information represents good practice, the results demonstrate huge variation in fixity practices across the community. There are a variety of practices reported across the survey questions, including at what point fixity information is verified, the frequency of checks, where fixity information is recorded, and the checksum algorithms in use.
Receiving fixity information at the time of acquisition remains a challenge.
Though fixity checking lends itself well to automation, for many it remains a fairly manual process, with a majority of respondents using manually-run software to carry out this activity.

In addition to analyzing the results of the survey, the Fixity Survey Working Group conducted follow-up interviews with five organizations to explore fixity practices in more detail. Case studies from four of these organizations are currently included in the report and provide a rich illustration of how fixity is used within specific organizations, and build on some of the findings of the survey itself.

You can read and/or download the Report, Data files, and Codebook from the NDSA OSF site.

Thank you to all of you who participated in the survey. We appreciate your time and effort spent in providing the information to us.

Thank you to the members of the Fixity Survey Working group who worked on a tight schedule to complete this work in time for DigiPres.

~ The 2021 Fixity Survey Working Group co-chairs