What We Struggle to Answer: Operational Metrics for Digital Preservation

When your stakeholders ask how many items you ingested last quarter, what your processing backlog looks like, or what it costs per terabyte to run your digital archives program, many of us go quiet. Not because the work isn’t happening, but because the frameworks we have were never built to measure it.

Digital preservation metrics have long run in two lanes, readiness & capability and access & usage. Both lanes matter. But neither answers the question being asked of us right now: is the work producing ‘evidence’ we can point to?

That missing lane is operational metrics such as system throughput, workflow efficiency, staff capacity at the program level. We don’t have shared vocabulary for these questions, and as pressure to justify our work grows, that gap is becoming a liability.

This talk launches a collaborative project to investigate what operational metrics for digital preservation should look like. We aim to develop a framework for those operational metrics that practitioners can adapt to their own contexts. If you have ever struggled to measure your digital preservation work, join us in starting a community of practice.

SLIDES

This session is part of Lightning Talks Session 2 and begins at 11:25