Survey of Staffing Practices and Needs Related to Digital Preservation, 2012

Businesses, cultural memory institutions, repositories, and government bodies seeking to preserve digital assets responsibly face significant staffing challenges. How many staff and what types of positions are required? What skills, education, and experience are appropriate? Should the organization hire new staff or retrain existing staff? What functions should be scoped as part of the program? In 2012, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Standards and Practices Working Group conducted a survey of institutions responsible for digital preservation to gain insight into how organizations worldwide were some of these questions. Survey respondents were asked to describe their organization type (library, archives, data repository, etc.), how much storage they were using for digital content, expected growth in preserved content over the next year, which types of activities were considered part of the scope of the digital preservation function, which activities were outsourced, whether there was a dedicated digital preservation department, how many FTEs were currently doing digital preservation work and how many would be ideal, which functions the digital preservation staff filled, whether the staffing arrangement worked well, whether the organization hired experienced digital preservation specialists or retrained existing staff, and the importance of various skills in hiring a new digital preservation manager. The survey received responses from 11 unique countries. The eleven options for repository type we provided were each represented. We also received additional responses in the free-text section that could constitute additional repository types.