Staffing for Effective Digital Preservation 2017: An NDSA Report

DESCRIPTION

The 2017 Digital Preservation Staffing Survey provides a useful snapshot of the way digital preservation is accomplished in 2017 and how its practitioners feel about the effectiveness of their current organizational structures. It also builds on the 2012 survey and begins to establish data with which the digital preservation community can identify trends in staffing in the field.

This dataset contains the publication, the codebook and the raw data originally published on OSF  (DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/3RCQK).

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In 2017, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) received completed survey responses from 133 institutions engaged in digital preservation, enabling the Staffing Survey Working Group to investigate how these organizations staffed and organized their
digital preservation functions, and to identify any changes since the NDSA’s 2012 survey on the same topic, published in “Staffing for Effective Digital Preservation: An NDSA Report.”2 We received 78% of the responses from the US, down from 86% in the 2012
survey. Other countries responding were the United Kingdom (8), Germany (4), Switzerland (3), the Netherlands (2), and one each from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Luxembourg, Pakistan, Slovenia, Sweden, and Uruguay.

One of the main focuses of the survey is on staffing levels. In response to these questions related to staffing levels, organizations reported an average of 13.6 FTE working in digital preservation activities. However, respondents indicated they would double that to 27.5 FTE in ideal circumstances. They expressed a particular need for more digital archivists, software developers, and cataloger/metadata analysts. Most respondents’ organizations (68%) retrained existing staff for at least some digital preservation functions, while 42% also hired experienced digital preservation specialists.

The findings on collection holdings show that the volume of holdings was larger than in the previous survey, but the expected rate of future growth had moderated. Whereas in 2012, 68% expected up to a 49% growth, in 2017, the largest percentage of respondents (73.2%), expected less than 25% growth in the collection. As in the 2012 survey, images and text documents continue to be the majority of digital files being preserved.
The survey also queried respondents about which digital preservation functions and activities were performed in-house and which were outsourced, and what the future plans for these functions and activities were. Most respondents appear to prefer conducting most digital preservation activities in-house. Emulation, which led the list of services considered for outsourcing, was selected by only 35% of respondents.

In 2017, 46% of respondents were not satisfied with how the digital preservation function was organized within their organization, while 25% believed it was organized properly. This is a significant decrease in satisfaction from 2012, when 43% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that their digital preservation functions were well-organized. Only 32% of respondents reported that their organization had a dedicated digital preservation department, which is down 1% from organizations responding in 2012.
The 2017 Digital Preservation Staffing Survey provides a useful snapshot of the way digital preservation is accomplished in 2017 and how its practitioners feel about the effectiveness of their current organizational structures. It also builds on the 2012 survey and begins to establish data with which the digital preservation community can identify trends in staffing in the field.