Archives & Special Collections - University Services
University of Glasgow
https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/archivespecialcollections/	


About the Storage Media Prioritisation tool										

Archives and Special Collections at the University of Glasgow have developed a methodology for prioritizing archival processing of digital collections stored in physical storage media. This tool is one way to use the methodology. For more information, please consult our iPres 2023 paper available at: https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/295807/  										


Licensing										

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ 	
						
The full list of references and primary sources used to compile the "Data - Storage media" tab can be found in the paper published in the iPRES 2023: The 19th International Conference on Digital Preservation proceedings. See: https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/295807/  										

How to use the tool										

1. Select the Generate priority score tab.									
	
2. Under the Storage medium details section, use the drop-down menu to select a storage medium type; and to specify the conditions that the medium has been kept in while in your care. Refer to iPres paper for an explanation of storage conditions. 									
	
3. Under the Prioritisation criteria weighting section, use the drop-down menus to choose a weight for each of the prioritisation criteria - the total must add up to 100%. The tool will calculate a prioritisation score even if the total does not equal 100%, but an alert will be displayed to notify you to amend the weights. 									
Our recommended weights are 55% for the Storage conditions criterion, and 15% or the remaining three criteria. This is based on community feedback and our experience that storage conditions can adversely affect the well-being of computer storage media, even those that have been produced within the last five years and/or have a longer average lifespan.									
	
This is a recommendation only, please amend the criteria weights to suit your organisational and digital processing needs.									
4. The calculated priority score and suggested priority action will be displayed under the Output section. Priority score ranges from 1 (lowest priority) to 5 (highest priority), and aligns with the DPC's Global Bit List of Endangered Digital Species: https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/champion-digital-preservation/bit-list 									

Support 										
The tool is provided for public use as-is, unfortunately we cannot offer technical support. Adapting this tool requires some intermediate-advanced knowledge of Excel, in particular working with formulae and lookup fields. The worksheets comprising the tool are protected to limit inadvertent editing - any changes will require to unprotect the sheets (no password required). 										


Contact us										
We would love to hear your feedback, suggestions and questions on the storage media prioritisation tool. You can contact us by email.

General enquiries: library-asc@glasgow.ac.uk
Leo Konstantelos (Senior Assistant Archivist, Digital): Leo.Konstantelos@glasgow.ac.uk
Emma Yan (Assistant Archivist): Emma.Yan@glasgow.ac.uk							

To learn more about our work at Archives & Special Collections, visit: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/archivespecialcollections/