Case study: Using the DiAGRAM tool for digital preservation

Abstract

As part of the Safeguarding the Nation’s Digital Memory project, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, project partners collaborated to produce a Bayesian network encapsulating digital preservation risks and the interactions between them. The integrated decision support system (IDSS) built around the Bayesian network was given the name DiAGRAM — a backronym for ‘Digital Archiving Graphical Risk Assessment Model’. In the words of the project mission, the IDSS allows archives ‘to investigate potential mitigations to digital preservation risks based on their own current circumstances, and communicate the relative effectiveness of different strategies (and the costs of different strategies) to relevant decision makers, funders and other stakeholders in an easy-tounderstand way. This will allow archives to evidence their requests for support based on a rigorous model which will have been developed using the experience of a wide range of institutions’. This case study examines how DiAGRAM can be used to achieve that objective.