by Sara Ring
Quick Summary
The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Fixity Survey Working Group announced the publication of the 2017 Fixity Survey Report. A common practice in digital preservation management, fixity checking is the act of reviewing digital content to make sure that it has not changed over time. Though an abundance of tools and methods for fixity checking exist, up to this point, there have been no established best practices. To better understand the common practices and challenges that exist for fixity checking, the NDSA Fixity Working Group published a survey in fall of 2017.
The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Fixity Survey Working Group announced the publication of the 2017 Fixity Survey Report. A common practice in digital preservation management, fixity checking is the act of reviewing digital content to make sure that it has not changed over time. Though an abundance of tools and methods for fixity checking exist, up to this point, there have been no established best practices. To better understand the common practices and challenges that exist for fixity checking, the NDSA Fixity Working Group published a survey in fall of 2017. The report summarizes the results from 89 completed surveys, including both broad trends and detailed information about respondent’s fixity practices. Here are a few of the themes that emerged in the report:
- The vast majority of respondents are fixity checking their content or are planning to do so.
- Fixity checking at specific times, such as to establish an initial baseline fixity value after acquiring content and rechecking fixity values after data transfers, is recognized as good practice.
- Fixity checking practices varied widely based on the organization, the amount of resources (human and technical) available, the types of software and hardware implemented, and the size of the data corpus to be preserved.
The report outlines next steps for this important work, such as follow-up surveys and organizational cases studies.
