Impact Assessment of Decision Criteria in Preservation Planning

Significant progress has been made in clarifying the decision factors to consider when choosing preservation actions and the directives governing their deployment. The Planets preservation planning approach and the tool Plato have received considerable takeup and produce a growing body of knowledge on preservation decisions. However, experience sharing is currently complicated by the inherent lack of semantics in criteria specification and a lack of tool support. Furthermore, the impact of decision criteria and criteria sets on the overall planning decision is often hard to judge, and it is unclear what effect a change in the objective evidence underlying an evaluation would have on the final decisions. This article presents a quantitative approach and tool to support the systematic assessment of criteria and their impact in preservation planning. We discuss the reconciliation of different quality models and present an analysis tool integrated with the planning tool Plato. We further apply our analysis method to a body of real-world case study material and discuss the results. The outcomes provide directions to optimise and automate decision-making, watch, and policy definitions at large scales, and to lower entry barriers by focussing on those aspects that have the strongest impact.