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4C Partners
The Digital Curation Sustainability Model
The purpose of the Digital Curation Sustainability Model (DCSM) is to highlight the key concepts, relationships and decision points for planning how to sustain digital assets into the future. The core assumption is that digital curation is the principal active means to achieve this and that understanding and successfully negotiating the case for sufficient resources to support digital curation is key. The DCSM builds on existing definitions and common understandings, not least the idea that:
Digital curation and data preservation are ongoing processes, requiring considerable thought and the investment of adequate time and resources 1
The point of any model is to provide a more readily understandable view of something more complex so that its overall 'shape' and general contours can be communicated and used for appropriate purposes at an appropriate level of detail. The DCSM can be understood in these terms and offers a generic template and a series of components to support discussions, analysis and planning for designing a sustainability strategy. The objective is to provide a set of reference points and concepts against which organisations or individuals can evaluate and compare their activities. Ultimately, the purpose of a model is to allow its users to reflect on and (if necessary) consider changes to the reality that it describes. The challenge for the model is to usefully simplify without being overly simplistic.
DIgital Curation Sustainability Model (1.07 MB)
