White paper "The Digital Divide Assessing Organisations’ Preparations for Digital Preservation: http://www.planets-project.eu/docs/reports/planets-market-survey-white-paper.pdf

Základní výsledky

■ The volume of digital content that organisations expect to archive will increase 25-fold over the next ten years.

■ While seventy per cent of organisations hold less than 20 terabytes (TB) of data now, by 2019 seventy per cent of organisations expect to hold over 100TB.

■ Digital information comes in a range of types, and while over 80% of organisations already need to preserve documents and images, by 2019 over 70% will need to preserve databases, websites, audio and video files as well.

■ Only 27% of organisations think that they have complete control over the file formats that they will accept and store in their digital archives. Since the choice of format affects how easy it is to preserve digital content, producers need to be more involved in digital preservation.

■ The digital preservation message has spread far and wide: 93% of respondents indicated that their organisation is aware of the challenges of managing digital information for the long-term.

■ Organisations are taking account of digital preservation: 76% include it in their operational planning, 71% in their business continuity planning and 62% in their financial planning.

■ By setting out a digital preservation policy, 48% of organisations are actively planning how to tackle digital preservation.

■ Organisations are only starting to commit to funding digital preservation, as just 47% have allocated a budget to it.

■ Maintaining the authenticity, reliability and integrity of records, checking they have not been damaged, and planning the preservation of content to deal with technical obsolescence are regarded as the most important capabilities of a digital preservation system.

■ There is demand for tools and services to automate preservation planning, to characterise digital collections and to convert digital objects to more accessible formats.

■ A policy is a vital first step towards tackling digital preservation’s challenges. Articulating a policy helps to build a business case, which may lead to obtaining a budget and implementing a solution.

■ Organisations which currently need to archive larger volumes, or a wider variety, of content are more likely to have a digital preservation policy in place. However, in ten years’ time, all organisations, regardless of whether or not they currently have such a policy, expect to hold similar volumes and range of digital content. Organisations must tackle the challenges of digital preservation. The first step for those who have not yet started, is to formulate a digital preservation policy. Those organisations with a policy need to work on implementing a digital preservation system, while suppliers need to respond to the demands of themarket and provide componentised solutions.