The AIDA toolkit: Assessing Institutional Digital Assets

1. The AIDA toolkit: Assessing Institutional Digital Assets Ed Pinsent, ULCC

3. Aims of the module • What is AIDA? • How it can help you • How it’s relevant to repository management • How you can use it • An exercise • Background, other tools, future outcomes

4. What AIDA is • Maturity model • Audit tool • Paper exercise • Assesses the Institution • Not the assets, file formats, software or repository • Looks at Organisation, Technology and Resources • Gets you to do the work • Shows strengths and weaknesses • Examines many areas • Encourages collaboration between disciplines • Helps with asset management (and preservation)

5. Relevance to this Course • AIDA can… • Measure your ability to manage digital content effectively • Show how good you are sustaining continued access • Be directly relevant to managing a repository (access, sharing, and usage) • Helps you find out where you are • Help you decide what to do next

6. Basis of AIDA • Based on the Cornell maturity model for describing institutional readiness and capabilities for digital preservation • Five Stages and Three Legs

8. AIDA

10. AIDA scope – organisation leg • Policies and mission statement • Sharing and continuity • Audit and monitoring • Metadata management • Contractual agreements • IPR and rights management • Disaster planning

11. AIDA scope – technology leg • IT environment / infrastructure • Appropriate technologies in place • Storage, backup, security mechanisms • Integrity, data corruption • Obsolescence, format management • Critical processes • Security of environment • Institutional repository management

12. AIDA scope – resources leg • Business planning • Resource allocation • Risk analysis • Business transparency • Sustainability of funding • Staff skills, numbers and training

13. Methodology • Profile your organisation • Look at the stages • Identify where you think you are • Position yourself • Do it at two levels • Record your decisions • Tick boxes • Submit form for scoring

16. AIDA weighted scorecard

17. Planning • Scope the AIDA exercise carefully, especially for the second tier • You can target one project, one department, or one collection • Agree roles of contributors and collaborators early on • Don't treat it as an audit • Don't spend too long looking for documentary evidence

18. Execution • Start to evolve agreement about marking the Stages (people may have different perceptions) • Don't assess or inventory individual assets or data - that's the job of DAF! • Get collaborators in the frame. IT input is essential! • Record your decisions methodically • Keep all notes of interviews, deliberations, etc. even if not used entered in the AIDA submission (they may tell you something useful now and later)

19. Exercise • Divide into four teams • One element from each leg, relating to one activity • Agree on the scope of what you will assess - work on a single Institution (real or imaginary) • Assess the capacity for this activity • Expected results: • A score for the element in each leg and at each level (6 scores in all) • Explain why you arrived at that decision • Roles / job titles of people consulted • Outline evidentiary sources that might help

20. Exercise feedback • Was it a straightforward exercise? • Could you understand what the process was trying to do? • Did AIDA omit anything important? • Were you able to 'recognise' yourself in the indicators? • Were any of the elements not a good fit for what you are actually doing?

21. What the test cases said • Why not just do it as an interview? • Doesn’t tell me anything I don’t know already • Should be better integrated as a toolkit • Terminology confusing • Difficult to apply to digital assets in practice • Not all questions relate to digital assets • Digital assets shouldn’t be considered in isolation from other assets • Lot of repetition • Jumps between stages are not consistent • A subjective process • Needs several people to arrive at a decision

22. How AIDA was built • An Audit Checklist for the Certification of Trusted Digital Repositories. This is the document originally produced by RLG-NARA, which later became Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC): Criteria and Checklist • The Cornell University Survey of Institutional Readiness • Summary of RLG-OCLC Framework Component Characteristics • Network of Expertise in long-term STORage (NESTOR)

23. DRAMBORA and DAF • DRAMBORA (Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment) • Requires much self-insight and preparedness • Sees everything as risk management • Predicated on TDR • A bit complex • DAF (Data Audit Framework) • Concerned with one asset type (research data) • Aims to improve management • Helps to measure value of research data

24. AIDA Self-Help Guide • How to move forward • Implies there is no moving forward to Stage 1 (Acknowledge) • Advice and guidelines • Not yet released • Not yet validated • A toolkit of toolkits • Tools aren’t always software

26. AIDA wiki • http://aida.da.ulcc.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

27. Asset management is more than preservation • Storage issues, de-duplication • Stop wasting money on creating (and storing) expensive assets we don't need • Share these useful assets which we do need • Throw away those assets which have expired • Make money from our assets

28. Future use • AIDA could work for any organisation with digital assets • Could work alongside records management • Results may help you make a case for more resource

29. Links / contact • AIDA website http://aida.jiscinvolve.org/ • Toolkithttp://aida.jiscinvolve.org/toolkit/ • Ed Pinsent e.pinsent@ulcc.ac.uk