LBSC 671 - Creating Information Infrastructures
Spring 2014 - Section 0101
Assignment G4 - Preservation Requirements Analysis

The goal of this assignment is to determine what actions must be taken to preserve the content of the collection that you have selected as your focus for this semester. As before, if you have many types of content in your collection that each have different preservation requirements, you need only select a few of those types as example for this assignment. Note that types here does not mean format types, but rather any types of materials that require different preservation decisions (e.g., books in a circulating library collection may have different preservation needs than rare books in a special collection).

The first step in a preservation needs assessment is to determine what preservation needs your collection has. To do this, first group the types of things in your collection into groups that have similar preservation needs. For example, you might draw a distinction on technical grounds (e.g., oral history interviews might have different preservation needs than newspaper clippings), you might draw a distinction on the basis of how long things need to be kept (as in the example in the prior paragraph), you might draw a distinction on the basis of legal requirements (e.g., tax records need to be kept for a different period than personnel records).

The next step is, for each type, to determine the extent to which equivalent materials are available elsewhere. For example, you might have digitized books that also exist in many physical collections -- these would have some built-in redundancy. Or you may have the only copy of the material substantiating a tax filing, and those materials may be confidential and thus not easily placed outside the control of your company.

Now you are well positioned to make decisions on what needs to be done. Decide for each type how long those things need to be kept, what strategies will be used to achieve that, and how that strategy will be implemented. Don't get carried away here -- this should not exceed a page or two (in total, over all your types). The key here is to give serious thought to what costs are justified by the actual preservation needs.

As a final step, make an estimate for what this will cost per year in steady state (i.e., after the preservation process has been set up). Don't worry -- this part won't be graded, so it doesn't matter if your estimate if off by a bit, or even by a lot! But it is important that you make as realistic an estimate as you reasonably can, since balancing costs and benefits is a key to good planning. You should include both storage costs and staff costs (figure that professional staff cost $40/hour after all costs such as salary, fringe benefits, and overhead costs such as office space have been accounted for).

Submit this in the same way as assignment G3 using your wiki page.