Hitting the Reset Button: Creating a Shared DigiPres Vision at the University of Michigan Library

Описание: Lance Stuchell, Director, Preservation Services, Digital Collections, University of Michigan Library
NDSA Digital Preservation 2025 Conference Session 4B2

In 2019, staff at the University of Michigan Library realized the foundations of our preservation program needed a reset. While several factors contributed to this situation, differing opinions on what constituted “digital preservation” were at the root of our problem.

To address the situation, stakeholders formed the Digital Preservation Steering Committee and, in 2021, released “Baseline Digital Preservation: Advancing Digital Preservation at the U-M Library.” The document, based on several sources, including the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation, outlined the agreed-upon minimal activities required for proper preservation at our institution.

While the Baseline represented a shared vision of where we wanted to be, we needed to determine how far we were from achieving it. The Steering Committee spent a year assessing our current systems and approaches against the criteria outlined in the Baseline. In 2023, findings were released in our first-ever full Systems Assessment, which identified gaps between our current reality and the shared vision for the program. Since then, we have incorporated lessons learned from the assessment into Version 2 of the Baseline (2024) and are undertaking a second round of assessment to document progress made since 2023.

This presentation will focus on how other institutions may adapt lessons learned from this process (using what worked and what didn’t), including how to merge perspectives on digital preservation into a shared vision using a community approach, how to make assessments part of core preservation work, and how this process can help prioritize resources in a financially constrained environment.