1. Nathan Tallman & Lauren Work 9/26/2018 iPRES 2018
Approaching Appraisal: Guidelines and Criteria to Select for Digital Preservation
Nathan Tallman & Lauren Work
9/26/2018
iPRES 2018
Organized into sections:
[terminology]
Selecting for General Collections
[selection of electronic materials]
Appraisal and Selecting for Special Collections
[digital content]
Comparing Criteria for General and Special Collections
[digital vs physical materials]
Guidelines and Criteria to Select for Digital Preservation
Criteria are a starting point -- would like community feedback, engagement, and to continue to expand guidelines doc

2. “Preservation specialist are best suited to identify the endangered materials within a particular collection, but subject specialist must then delineate priorities among those items.”
~ Dan C. Hazen, 1982
Dan C. Hazen Collection Development, Collection Management and Preservation. Library Resources & Technical Services 26, 1. 8.
Preservation is a collection management activity -- whether it’s physical or digital, it’s still collection management and we should use the same guiding principles and philosophies. Selectors and curators should make the decisions.

3. Selecting for General Collections
Audience for this paper is really selectors, curators more than digital preservationist, but preservationist may introduce this to them.
books by Vectors Market from the Noun Project
database by Mister Pixel from the Noun Project
painting by Ben Davis from the Noun Project
Movie by Obist Studio from the Noun Project

4. Trends in Selecting for General Coll. over past 35 years
Adoption and use of collection development plans.
Movement away from item-by-item selection to automated mechanisms.
Populism vs traditionalism
Use of metrics
Redundancy between print and electronic materials
Purchasing vs licensing
Art meet science -- this is the heart of selection
Strong collection development rooted in needs assessment
Approval plans, blanket orders, etc.
Populism
Demand theory, liberalist point of view
Give users what they want
Justify use of public funds
Traditionalism
Value or quality theory, educational theory
Give users what they need
Libraries as centers of knowledge
Quantitative selection
Local use data
Quantitative selective scoring
Evaluation vs selection
Evaluation -- no purchase, just review and make decision on overall value
Selection -- purchase decision

5. Nathan Tallman. 2018. Selection for Digital Preservation Dataset
Nathan Tallman Selection for Digital Preservation Dataset. DOI:
Mapped 203 separate criteria to 14 normalized criteria from 13 sets of criteria found in the literature.
Content 29 (completeness, uniqueness, quality, subject, coverage)
Usability 25 (access and design, openURL, ease of use, special features, vendor support and responsiveness)
Collection Context 20
Accessibility 19
Licensing / Purchase 17
Authority 16
Need / Use 16
Format 15
Cost 13
Audience 10
Timeliness 10
Accuracy 5
Preservation 5 (preservability, condition)
Language 3

6. Nathan Tallman. 2018. Selection for Digital Preservation Dataset
Nathan Tallman Selection for Digital Preservation Dataset. DOI:
Mapped 117 separate criteria to 13 normalized criteria from 8 sets of criteria found in the literature.
Usability 22
Licensing / Purchase 16
Accessibility 15
Content 14
Collection Conext 14
Cost 7
Format 7
Authority 5
Need / Use 5
Preservation 5
Timeliness 3
Accuracy 2
Audience 2

7. Appraisal and Selection for Special CollectionsLW

8. Selecting and Appraising Archives and Manuscripts
“The process of evaluating actual or potential acquisitions to determine if they have sufficient long-term research value to warrant the expense of preservation by an archival repository”
~F. Gerald Ham, 1993
Selecting and Appraising Archives and Manuscripts

9. Appraisal theory for SC&A over the last century
Early theory of neutrality and stewardship only
Mid-20th century theory shift toward active selection and appraisal within the deluge of modern public records system
Cost/benefit, primary/secondary value, “black box”
Societal paradigm, functional analysis and macro-appraisal, total archives
Digital and born digital appraisal
We also need more focus on the practical application of theory/method, something that has been almost wholly ignored in appraisal writing—how do we actually implement decisions (whichever method/theory they are based on) in the real world where we never have enough time to analyze records, often have to make decisions in front of records creators, and must reckon with the limitations of our processing and storage resources. (Greene 2009)

10. Comparing Criteria for General and Special Collections
Rights and reuse
Uniqueness
Extent and volume
Creator and provenance
Organization
Cost
Collection development
Lending obligations vs access and reuse in other works
Widely published vs rare or unique
Single item/set vs aggregation of materials
Also, shelf space, disk space
Authority of creator in general, context and quality of the provenance in special
Scope, coverage
Organization of information in a resources vs organization of resources in boxes/storage media
Scale, level of understanding to be useful, amount of labor to make useful
Cost to purchase, cost to process, cost to store, cost to make available, cost to preserve
Collection foci

11. Guidelines and Criteria to Select for Digital Preservation
This is a start, we want to engage the community, get feedback, iterate and improve these to make them useful, expand guidelines and guidance, start to thinking about how to help people implement or connect to local levels of commitment to preservation.

12. Use Cases
Introduce both a special collections & archives and general collections use case.
SCA: 10 TB born digital UC photographs
General: 6 TB of digitized aerial photography

13. Criteria: Value
Value in
Value by Aneeque Ahmed from the Noun Project

14. Criteria: Uniqueness
Snowflake by habione 404 from the Noun Project

15. Criteria: Cost
marketing cost by Iris Li from the Noun Project

16. Criteria: Legal/Fiduciary
safe by shashank singh from the Noun Project

17. Criteria: Restrictions
blocked by ProSymbols from the Noun Project

18. Criteria: Preservability of Content and Context

19. Questions, Comments, Concerns, and Feedback?

20. Nathan Tallman Lauren Work ntt7@psu.edu lw2cd@virginia.edu
Thank you!
Nathan Tallman Lauren Work