In a project with The National Archives, we built a decision support tool which allowed them to make a business case for investment in increased security of digital archives. Digital archives, and the materials held in them, are rich, complex and fragile. They are under threat from rapidly evolving technology, outdated policies and a skills gap across the archives sector internationally. However, since preserving digital objects is a relatively recent phenomenon in archival terms, a systematic study of the nature and relative importance of the risk structures had not been done. There was no consensus or consistency about relevant data collection, leading to data gaps. Building on a recently-developed Bayesian paradigm, the Integrating Decision Support System developed here at Warwick, we partnered with The National Archives, and other archives across the world to undertake a decision analysis and encode the results into a tool (DiAGRAM) to evaluate an archive’s risk profile and designed for easy use by archives nation- and world-wide.
DiAGRAM was a worldwide finalist in the Digital Preservation Coalition Awards 2020 and a worldwide winner of the Decision Analysis Practice Award 2022.