 Hi everyone, I'm Roger Schoenfeld from Ithaca SNR and I am joined by my colleague Oya Rieger also from Ithaca SNR. And we are going to be talking to you today about some work we've been doing to look at the preservation systems landscape. So if I could have the next slide. This is a project that was funded has been funded by IMLS for which we're extremely grateful that where we're looking at the what we've characterized as the effectiveness and durability of digital preservation and curation services. As you, as you probably realize this is part of a broader agenda that a lot of us have been concerned about around preservation over the course of time if our preservation systems and infrastructure isn't fit for purpose, then as much resource as we put into preservation we may find ourselves with weaknesses in the system so Oya and I have been working together and with some other colleagues on a project to look at this landscape and examine ultimately where there are practices that are working well and where there are some gaps that we think may need to be addressed. The project goals at a really high level is looking at what we've called digital preservation and curation systems, how they've been not just developed and not just deployed but but today how they're being sustained. We're looking at this not from some kind of idealized perspective. We're really looking specifically at the business approaches that these initiatives have been using. Both not for profit, as well as profit seeking initiatives both community driven and commercial initiatives we're really looking across the landscape and trying to do some comparative analysis as part of understanding those those business approaches and what's working and what it's not. And our second goal. Sorry, I still still on the goals if we can go back for a second our second goals to really look at sustainability principles, trying to design actionable recommendations and ultimately helping the client organizations the libraries museums. The community organizations that need to use digital preservation systems, figure out how to make how to make good choices in an environment of some complexity. Now we can tap the next slide please. And so, in a nutshell, we want to separate two different kinds of systems that are important for digital preservation purposes so the first set which we're not looking at in this project, but are very important for our work. And the second set is actually our cross institutional efforts that that curate that preserve specific content types or collections. And you know we've got a few examples of some of these they could be electronic journals they could be digitized books they could be the web broadly. And in other words that where the curatorial work is taking place by a what from the perspective of an individual library or museum is a third party organization. And the third type of digital preservation work that is really really important that that the institutions that typically hold print or tangible versions of materials have been looking for how to support their efforts to curate to make discoverable to provide long term management and preservation of their own institutional digital content. And these, these organizations, sometimes they use internally developed digital curation and preservation systems and in other cases they're using third party systems and services, those are the focus of our project that we're reporting on today. So, so in the next slide. I'm going to share very quickly about the research methodology and then I'm going to turn things over to oil in just a moment. What we've been doing is we've been looking broadly through desk research and and our own experience and otherwise about some of the dynamics of these of these systems broadly we've done some landscape review etc. We've selected eight of these systems for close examination. The team conducted interviews with leaders of the systems contributors to the work users non users clients, non participants etc, trying to understand things not only from the perspective of the creators and maintainers of these systems, but also from user clients, etc. We drafted. We did dug deeply into these eight into these eight systems and use them distributed across commercial non commercial profit seeking community etc organizations we we did what is essentially a kind of a case method to look at how at what we could learn broadly from some comparative analysis across those, but we did make a commitment not to share, you know, private information about them so we really, we really, we had access to some additional information from these interviews that that allowed us to learn with some richness beyond what is sometimes publicly reported what's working and what's not across these across these systems. And I should just say that these are, these are those eight systems I won't, I won't read them all out. But you know you'll recognize hopefully many if not, if not all of these as as digital creation and preservation systems. But in our in our report what we really want to emphasize more so than this one is doing well at this and that one could be doing better at that, but we really want to emphasize is a broad set of cross system analysis that we believe, we believe can provide some value to the community not only in thinking about which systems may make sense for which institutions to use but more broadly around how these investments can be, and how investments in these systems can be can be optimized in the future. So now I'll turn things over to to Oya to walk through some of what we found. Thank you for the introduction, Roger. So, I'm going to be happy to share our findings and our teams. And I want to first indicate that our findings should be approached as an empirical snapshot of insights and perceptions, rather than broad characterizations of the digital preservation and creation marketplace. In many ways, digital preservation such a well established concept. However, what it really means and how it is put into practice very widely among institutions. For some reformatting legacy media such as a B is digital preservation, and for some institutions digitizing analog special collections count as digital preservation and this is just really to offer two quick examples. Heritage organizations rely on a range of solutions, based on their resources and needs and mission so so. And the term preservation is really kind of turning into a machine in a way in the sense that in the sense that providers are marketing their offerings as preservation systems, regardless of actual functionality or storage configurations. Many systems marketed as preservation systems usually address only some aspects of the preservation work here actually I have a very simple life cycle chart and in reality it's not as linear, but digital preservation really is composed of multiple processes as I said not only linear. So thinking about this life cycle. Another issue that you want to mention is digital preservation involves a network of systems and people with various dependencies. For instance, how digital content is created and processed within an organization has implications for preparing content for a preservation repository, and it's not easy to align systems. It's not needed but here's a code from an interview from a library, where this person is emphasizing the complex system landscape that each organization operates and including integrated library systems, institution repositories, research data repositories web archiving systems, so on so forth. We actually as Roger explained we looked into both commercial systems and also not for profit systems we really are not intending to binerize the landscape, but we just wanted to kind of highlight some of their characteristics. And, and one thing that we noticed and I think this is really kind of obvious to those of us in the heritage sector is that, you know we have legions to mission driven organizations. And, you know, there is definitely preference for supporting kind of value driven initiatives. Remember, you know running implementing an open source, or a community based system that requires active park station from a host institution can be, you know, very demanding, especially if you don't have access to developers and deluxe it's hard to retain staff. So therefore, what we have seen is different heritage organizations as they are selecting a system. They of course prefer to work with value driven organizations, but they're also trying to find partners that are based on the resources and abilities. So to actually read this code from a library staff, this person said, I'm very much on the side of open source within the library up to the dean, there's an understanding of the benefits of open source and free systems, including open educational resources and open access materials. However, there's very much a strong impulse to use commercial systems of large vendors for our services. The most concerning elements of the digital preservation system is a fear that it will be difficult and potentially impossible for the client to move to an alternative system or service. And commercial service providers are very well aware of the sentence and they understand that some organizations are afraid that heritage materials might get locked. However, this is really a concern for both commercial and not for profit systems, as they all need to really discuss and plan your exit strategies with its mergers or what is entering a new phase. And actually here's a quote from another staff and actually this is representing a commercial service provider. This person said, if you can't exit from our preservation system, it is not a preservation system. The question is not whether you can get your content out or not, it's how complex it is to get at. If you have solutions, you know, in terms of looking at risk factors, they are prone to risks as they tend to have limited capital, limited resources, and they have comparatively demanding governance structures. As a result, some have not been able to innovate quickly enough to keep up with the needs of heritage organizations. Many universities actually one trend we have observed is that many universities have either centralized or in the process of centralizing their it units to allow more cohesive governance, and also for fiscal management. This trend is kind of worrisome from the library's perspective because it reduces their flexibility for sitting priority than also for having specialized IT staff, especially with deep understanding of preservation issues. Here is what we heard from a library staff which was really a very common sentiment. It is becoming harder to use open source tools and the university is moving towards enterprise systems, especially to fulfill security issues. The commercial system providers we talked with, they are growing. They are actually expanding the different sectors, for instance by a medicine but they're also actively talking with heritage organizations to introduce their systems or to respond to RFPs. And this growing reliance, it could be seen as a risk too, but we must note that both commercial providers and not for profit providers, they all seem to be very committed to what they are doing and believe in the importance of building and supporting the community. For commercial entities, although we had very candid conversations with our colleagues who are presenting commercial services, clearly you know there is not full fiscal and technical transparency, so it's difficult to understand the robustness of the solutions. However, they really stress competitive pricing, and they have a very strong service driven approach to drive growth. Digital preservation landscape is complex and dynamic expectations and attitude vary, especially based on organization resources and priorities. This is really kind of a double edged sword in a way, because this is a strength, allowing organizations to contribute on their own terms, based on their means. However, this could also be a risk factor if you look at the diversity of approaches, especially if we have this broad stance of there are no rights where doing preservation, or perhaps unwilling to or shortage of talking about the available options, shortcomings and problems. Since the framing of digital preservation as a critical program area in the early 1990s, a considerable amount of progress has been made. We really want to acknowledge and highlight the preservation community's dedication and hard work. It was definitely beyond the scope of the studies research, but our study means of interviews with both commercial vendors, not for profit service providers and heritage organizations. Everybody pointed out to growing gap between the institutions with resources and those with limited expertise and staff. Actually, I'm going to read this code. I think it very well articulates the point here. This person said, I'm quite concerned that we are trying to attend to locally owned or digitized content, and have not even started thinking about how to archive stuff, like research data or social media with a range of rights management and privacy requirements. That is actually conclude by sharing with you kind of three issues, maybe overarching observations. The first one is, it's really difficult to compare different systems and I can just imagine how difficult it is for potential clients. If you look at the website of different solutions, different service providers, it's very difficult to compare their features, competent advantage, product distinction, and categories of content preserved. It is unclear. One library staff said, I believe that what a digital preservation solution actually is very unclear. All of them support OIS and still all of them are completely different in many ways. The second broad observation is, how do we assess different elements of the preservation landscape? We have stewardship commitments with stewardship organizations. We talk about effectiveness of preservation systems. And then there's, you know, well being of preservation repositories, assessment metrics and processes that garnered great attention of the community. Perhaps, you know, 20 years ago seemed to really lose their initial appeal. So I think we wanted to kind of highlight it as an observation, the importance of evaluating the liability, commitment and readiness. The third point that we want to make is, we looked into 40 preservation systems and then zooming to eight. And I think it's really good to have competition. Heritage organizations greatly benefit from a rich area of services, whether they are not for profit or heritage, or for profit. And I think we will all benefit from shaping the commercial offerings to serve the best interest of the heritage community. And we have seen the examples of coupling not for profit systems or open source systems with professional services offered by vendors. It's emerging as an effective strategy, especially for organizations with limited resources. So our study aims not only to further increase our understanding of sustainable principles but also of course to a discussion of the preliminary findings. Therefore, we are going to be publishing a report toward the end of this month. And then we will have a series of conversations, we will convene forums, share the findings with key stakeholders, especially service providers, funders, policy makers. And then, based on what we are hearing, we will publish in early 2022, a report to incorporate the feedback together to the stakeholders. And I want to thank you for attending this session. And we look forward to hearing from you. Please don't hesitate if you have any comments or questions. Thank you.