Preservation Services Planning: A Decision Support Framework

Commercial organizations are experiencing a growing need to access business-critical data in the longer term of their operations. Governmental regulations as well as commercial interests influence this need. Organizations are willing to procure cost-effective services to this end services that are increasingly based as public or private cloud solutions. With the advent of autonomous cloud services comes the possibility to assemble (mix and match) preservation services in a workflowbased service-oriented solution. Following the interaction with information managers in (three) commercial organizations operating in different markets and after a review of current literature, we have revealed a lack of comprehensive guidelines and decision support in service selection as part of preservation planning. Existing models and frameworks used for assessing the quality of preservation services either manage performance-based features that service provider’s offer or the technical details of the preservation actions themselves. In this paper we present our preservation-planning framework (Preserv-Qual) that addresses the need for decision support in the selection of preservation services that explicitly acknowledge the differences among aspects of information use within an organization. We describe the outcome from an evaluation of the framework in three commercial organisations as a service quality assessment and decision support tool. This paper shows how our framework supports the use of existing and proven methods, models and principles for service assessment, digital preservation and decision support.