1. Trends & Challenges in Digital Object Storage Infrastructure: Notes from the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Infrastructure Working Group Storage Survey On behalf of the NDSA: Nancy McGovern, MIT Libraries Jefferson Bailey, Library of Congress MDOR Roundtable SAA Annual Meeting Wednesday, August 8, 2012

2. Membership: 127 member organizations have joined the NDSA since it was founded in July 2010 An initiative of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) open to any organization committed to the preservation of digital cultural heritage http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa Objective : A collaborative effort among government agencies, educational institutions, non-profit organizations, and business entities to preserve a distributed national digital collection for the benefit of citizens now and in the future.

3. Working Groups NDSA members commit to participating in one of the five working groups of the Alliance Infrastructure Working Group: Working to identify and share emerging practices around the development and maintenance of tools and systems for curation and preservation. Content InfrastructureInnovation Standards & Practices Outreach

4. NDSA Infrastructure Storage Survey Goal: Obtain a snapshot of current digital object storage practices within NDSA membership Details: Conducted between August and November 2011 58 responses from the (then) 74 NDSA members actively preserving digital content Results: Published in parts via the NDIIPP blog, The Signal http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/ http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/ Full report forthcoming

5. Scope The Storage Survey examined activities around 4 topics associated with digital preservation infrastructure: Access – How do access requirements impact digital preservation infrastructure? Distribution – How are institutions using cloud and distributed storage systems for preservation? Fixity – How are institutions ensuring file fixity? Administration – How are institutions currently ensuring and strategically planning for digital preservation storage infrastructure.

6. Access: Modes of Access Percentage of NDSA Orgs Supporting Each Access Mode

7. Access: Requirements & Systems REQUIREMENTS: 53% (31 of 58) reported having a single access requirement (e.g. on- line availability) for all the collections they are preserving. 33% (19 of 58) reported supporting two degrees of access requirements among their collections 14% (8 of 58) reported supporting three or more degrees of access among their collections. SYSTEMS: 65% (37 of 58) reported providing separate systems for storage and access 35% (20 of 58) reported using the same system for storage and access

8. Distribution: Cooperative, Contract & Cloud Storage

9. Distribution: Geographic & System Preferences Priorities for storage system functionality: More built-in functions like fixity checking More automated inventory and retrieval More storage space Higher performance processing (tasks such as indexing)

10. File Fixity: Current Practices

11. File Fixity: Frequency of Checking

12. Administration: Replication & Media

13. Administration: Forecasting Storage Storage Space Amount Current Storage For All Copies Requirement Anticipated in 3 Years For All Copies Under 10 TB1710 10-99 TB1915 100 to 999 TB1416 1000+ TB (1+ PB)511 Over the next three years my organization plans to…AgreeNeutralDisagree Make significant changes in preservation storage technologies 37 (64%)10 (17%)11 (19%) Will have adequate resources to meet storage requirements 48 (83%)7 (12%)3 (5%) Has a plan to meet our preservation storage requirements 45 (78%)9 (16%)4 (7%) Plans to meet trustworthy digital repository requirements 34 (60%)20 (35%)5 (9%)

14. Challenges Access: Supporting multiple modes of access can require customization of the preservation stack Access modes largely “conditional” thus requiring tailored workflows Distribution: Cloud-storage emerging, but feature-poor Greater automated features desired in future storage systems Fixity: Validation can be processing & I/O intensive Multiple storage media types can complicate checking Best practices for frequency of checking are unclear Administration: Cost of file and media redundancy Results showed a bottom-up approach to storage, as opposed to the TRAC top- down approach, though over 60% planned on eventual TRAC compliance Systems migrations still difficult, expensive

15. More information about the Alliance is at www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/ Content InfrastructureInnovation Standards & Practices Outreach Read about NDSA work on The Signal blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/ THANKS! Nancy McGovern, MIT Libraries Jefferson Bailey, Library of Congress