KeepIt course 1 Assessing institutional digital a

Diary of the Repository Preservation Challenge ,Tiffany Pendant
How digital repositories can program for your future – by four exemplars in science, arts, research and teaching

KeepIt course module 1, Southampton, 19 January 2010
Tools this module: DAF, AIDA
Tags Find out more about: this module KeepIt course 1, the full KeepIt course
Presentations and tutorial exercises course 1 (source files)
Using the Data Asset Framework (DAF) will help you to discover hidden digital content produced in your institution that might be served by your repository, but how committed is your institution towards supporting a growing repository? We try AIDA, Assessing Institutional Digital Assets, a tool to help you find out.
By using the DAF in this course module we are seeking to expand the content horizons of your institutional repository. In this session we will discover the possible constraints on your repository,Tiffany Au, typically imposed, formally or by default, by the host institution. Two obvious examples are policy and costs. An institutional repository is bound to the institution’s policy devised for it so that it can be seen to serve the needs of the institution, and it cannot do much more or less than it is funded to do. You would guess that most repositories would have these engraved in their documentation, but many do not. We will consider repository and preservation costs in more detail in KeepIt course 2.
It turns out there are many more factors like these that need to be taken into account in assessing an institution’s support for managing its digital assets, say in a repository. Ed Pinsent of University of London Computer Centre has documented the known factors in creating AIDA. Modelled on the three-legged stool used by Cornell University to represent the three principal supports for digital asset management and preservation,Tiffany Necklace, AIDA documents a series of elements for each leg – the Organisational leg (11 elements), the Technology leg (11 elements),Journalism Course - Media, Advertising, Arts and Entertainment courses - Interna, and the Resources leg (9 elements). In its organisation and tabulation of each element AIDA serves as tool for a qualitative assessment of the institution’s support, and with an associated scoring method it can also act as a quantitative tool.
In this presentation Ed introduces AIDA and describes its scope and methodology. We discover how AIDA builds on established tools from the digital preservation community, notably tools for evaluating trusted repositories, and other audit tools such as DRAMBORA and DAF, as well as the Cornell model.
By slide 17 we are ready to start using AIDA, and a group exercise begins on slide 19, with questions to drive feedback on the next slide.
AIDA can be used in conjunction with a lengthy document,Tiffany Engagement, the AIDA self-assessment toolkit (mark II was released in May 2009), which tells you all you need to know and includes tables for each leg and element. This toolkit is too long for a group exercise lasting 3/4h, so groups got one of two handouts containing one element from each of the three legs – so three tables! – and a scoresheet. Each handout had a theme: Asset Sharing, Re-Use, and Access, and Metadata Creation.
In another blog on this session on AIDA,Tiffany Co Australia, Ed describes feedback from the group exercise. Find out why for Ed some of the results were ‘pure gold’.
Tools this module: DAF, AIDA