Leslie Johnston
Director of Digital Preservation
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
In early September 2019, NARA released its complete digital preservation framework for public comment on GitHub: a File Format Risk and Prioritization Matrix used to calculate risk levels for over 350 file format variants so far, as well as 15 draft Preservation Action Plans, each addressing a different record type (digital design, email, still images, word processing files, web archives, etc.). The plans propose processing and preservation actions for the formats and the potential tools to be used; in some cases, the plans identify where further research is needed into the best preservation approach to take, and where there are no easy decisions about which tools to use. NARA released these not just to provide transparency into its digital preservation risk assessment process, but to elicit comments, discussions, and suggestions for approaches and tools from our colleagues and researchers. This presentation will provide an overview of the digital preservation framework and the preservation action plans, discuss the reception and the feedback received during the 2-month long public comment period, and how the formal release of the plans in 2020 will incorporate the suggestions and inform practice in the digital preservation community.
https://www.archives.gov/preservation/electronic-records
https://github.com/usnationalarchives/digital-preservation
