Selection, Appraisal, Ingest

1
Selection, Appraisal, Ingest

• About deciding
• What is the universe of things that we might
  preserve?
• Which of those things will we actually preserve?
• How do we capture them in our repository?
• How do we know that we have done what we set out
  to do ?
• How can we improve our processes?

2
Digital possibilities

• All these tasks traditionally involve much human
  input
• Many are now seeking to automate some aspects of
  the process
• This requires us to have policies
• It requires us to question traditional
  assumptions about the role of appraisal and
  selection in particular

3
SA in traditional cultural heritage

• We need to discard material because
• It takes up space, which costs money
• Ingest takes time more money
• Too much material isnt useful
• Usually cheaper to decide to discard than to
  ingest preserve an object

4
A different world

• What if it is cheaper to ingest it than to make a
  decision?
• What if analysis tools make huge collections easy
  to search?
• (Imperfect) Example the Internet Archive
• How well can we trust automated decision-making?
  (e.g. IIPC)

5
Models we can share

• We need common ways to represent decisions and
  actions taken before, during and after ingest
• We expect greater mobility and sharing of
  material
• We can utilise shared resources such as file
  format registries (c.f. catalogue records,
  authority files)
• Common language resources reduced costs
  more preservation

6
Models and experience

• PREMIS enabled NDAD to streamline workflows
• Representation Information Registry also likely
  to produce benefits
• DELOS and PRESERV examples of this in practice