July 2020 member survey summary

The Australasia Preserves co-organisers surveyed members of the community of practice for suggestions on future monthly meetup topics and activities and to get an idea of where members are from. The survey was open for the month of July 2020 with 53 responses in total. With around 360 members of the Google Group as of July 2020, this is a response rate of 15% - noting that the survey was also shared publicly on Twitter.

 

Results

79.2% of respondents are from Australia, with the remaining 20.8% from New Zealand. No respondents indicated they were from another country.

Respondents were allowed to choose up to five of fourteen predetermined topics for future monthly meetups. The top six are:

1. Digital preservation metadata - standards and schema
2. Digital Preservation Essentials overview
3. Case studies
4. Fail club - unrecorded ad hoc discussion on what hasn’t worked
5. Storage strategies - how many copies do you have?
6. Digital preservation for small non-profit and community organisations

Respondents were also allowed to suggest additional topics, with 17 responses. These were normalised, where some used this for additional votes on predetermined topics which were added to the counts. 13 additional topics were suggested in total:

1. Collaborative projects/initiatives relating to digital preservation infrastructure
2. Born-digital video preservation
3. Cross-team workflows for managing born-digital and digitised material
4. Demos of different digital preservation repository platforms and tools by members
5. Digital preservation and cybersecurity
6. Digital preservation and the application of FAIR
7. Digital preservation IT infrastructure and architecture
8. Digitisation for preservation
9. Digitisation workflows
10. Engagement and outreach to digital scholarship community
11. How to efficiently run fixity across large datasets
12. Preserving databases
13. Time-based media

There was 1 vote for each of the above, except for collaborative projects which received 2. There were also 2 responses indicating interest in presenting at future monthly meetups. There were 0 responses expressing interest in organising and running a monthly meetup.

Lastly, 36.5% of respondents (19) indicated they would be interested in a monthly journal or article “book club”.

 

Next steps

Thank you to everyone who participated in the survey. The co-organisers will use these results to plan upcoming events and scheduling for the remainder of 2020, so keep an eye out on the forum and event calendar.

As always, we welcome offers to present or organise events as part of the Australasia Preserves digital preservation community of practice. You can get in touch via the website: https://www.australasiapreserves.org/p/contact.html