Staffing Survey – NDSA Blog

The 2021 NDSA Staffing Survey is a 2024 Digital Preservation Award Finalist

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has recently announced the finalists for the 2024 Digital Preservation Awards. We are very pleased to announce that the Working Group team behind the revision and reimagining of the 2021 NDSA Staffing Survey are finalists for the International Council on Archives Award for Collaboration & Cooperation. You can read our full award application summary here.

The redesign of the 2021 NDSA Staffing Survey was a significant international effort to build and refine one of the only longitudinal open datasets of its kind by reconfiguring the survey from an organizational focus (as seen in the 2012 and 2017 versions), to allow for individual participation. This shift allowed for a more detailed picture of the current state of digital preservation staffing to emerge from the data, and was the product of intensive collaboration between the members of the Working Group, as well as the digital preservation community.

DPC members will be selecting their first and second choices for each category as well as providing feedback on the finalists to the judges before winners are selected. Voting opens on this Friday, June 14 and closes on Friday, July 12, 2024. (If you are a DPC member, we would really appreciate your vote!)

Winners will be announced at iPres 2024 in Ghent, Belgium on Monday, September 16.

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

Request for Participation in Fixity and Staffing Survey Working Groups

Proposals have been accepted by the NDSA Coordinating Committee for starting up the Staffing Survey Working Group and the Fixity Survey Working Group. Both surveys were last published in 2017. If you are interested in participating in either of these groups please read the scope of work for each and complete the form below by April 2, 2021.

It is expected that work for both surveys would start Spring 2021 and end about a year/year and a half later, with groups generally meeting on a monthly basis. Work would also be done between meetings to review the survey questions and results, and to write a final report. We especially welcome participation from international NDSA members and members who have not previously participated in NDSA groups.

Fixity Survey Scope of Work: Review of survey, survey deployment, data analysis, writing final report

Staffing Survey Scope of Work: Survey redesign, survey deployment, data analysis, research, writing final report

If you have questions, please contact:

Fixity: Carol Kussmann (kussmann@umn.edu)

Staffing: Lauren Work (lw2cd@virginia.edu) or Elizabeth England (elizabeth.england@nara.gov)

Please complete this form by April 2, 2021.