Ensuring long-term access to digital assets using a capability maturity model

Abstract

Every organisation — public, private or not-for-profit, big or small — has converted or created digital content that must remain available, usable, understandable and trustworthy for long periods of time. This may be due to legal, compliance or regulatory reasons, a desire to safeguard organisational memory and history, or driven entirely by operational requirements. Long-term access to digital content, however, does not happen by accident — it takes information governance, planning, sustainable resources and a keen awareness of the technology and file formats that an organisation uses, as well as attention to evolving standards and computing trends. This paper reviews the challenges of ensuring long-term access to digital records and information assets and proposes a standards-based approach for mitigating these challenges using the Digital Preservation Capability Maturity Model.