Assignment Task

This assignment requires you to write a preservation plan for providing continuing access to, and preservation of, your personal digital archive. It must:

1. Use a report format.
2. Identify and critically assess with reference to the digital curation lifecycle, the risks which might affect continuing access to, and usability of, the specified files in the collection. 
3. Explain the steps required and make recommendations about how to ensure collection accessibility and usability with reference to the digital curation lifecycle using correct digital curation and preservation concepts and terms.
4. Justify your assessments, explanations, recommendations, and conclusions with evidence from references and content in Modules 1-6 and your own research.

Based on the scenario below, write a preservation plan 

Scenario: a personal digital archive

You are writing a preservation plan for your personal digital archive, which has never been properly organised or cared for. You have a large archive of photographs, which includes JPEG, TIF, and PNG files. There are duplicates in the collection, but they are stored under different filenames. The Documents folder on your computer contains a range of documents from PDFs of old invoices to spreadsheets of family members’ addresses, and Word documents of old university content. You have a number of videos taken on your mobile phone; there is also older content stored on CD-ROMs and 3.5-inch floppy disks. Stored on a portable hard drive you have the outputs and working files of a personal creative project.

You should structure your preservation plan as a report with the following main sections:

• Title page
• Table of contents
• Introduction 
• Collection Overview
• Risk Assessment 
• Preservation Plan 
• Conclusion 
• References

When writing the collection overview, think about surveying and identifying your collection: what do you have and where is it stored? Please embellish on the scenario and be specific about file types and what kind of descriptive metadata you have kept (there might be nothing more than what is embedded in the file – but how will you find out what that is?).

The risk assessment should look at the current, specific risks your personal digital data. And it should create some kind of scope for selection criteria – will you be keeping everything? Do not forget to consider future risks as more content is created.

The preservation plan should recommend the steps necessary to curate your personal digital data and preserve it for long-term access. Consider how you will organise your data to find it, what metadata you need to understand it, whether or not the formats are suitable, and potentially where to store it. Make sure your preservation plan addresses the risks you identified in the risk assessment.