DPC Rapid Assessment Model
This chapter will cover:
- DPC RAM Organisation Capabilities
- Levels of RAM
- DPC RAM Service Capabilities
- Mapping DPC RAM to ALCOA principles
Click here for a reminder on what the DPC RAM is.
As described in the LTDP Good Practice chapter, the DPC Rapid Assessment Model (RAM) has Organisational Capabilities and Service Capabilities.
This report maps general requirements for long-term Data Integrity to the DPC RAM Organisational Capabilities and then each ALCOA principle to the DPC RAM Service Capabilities.
DPC RAM Organisational Capabilities
Organisational Capabilities consider whether the organisation can support and sustain digital preservation. This needs to be in place if the organisation is to be successful when meeting regulatory requirements for long-term Data Integrity.
Each element below considers the minimum DPC RAM level that is likely to be needed in order to provide the sustainable digital preservation of regulated GxP data in Life Sciences.
There are 5 levels in DPC RAM:
- 0 – Minimal Awareness
- 1 – Awareness
- 2 – Basic
- 3 – Managed
- 4 – Optimised
When considering the appropriate DPC RAM levels, we make the following observations:
For many organisations, the suggested minimum levels of DPC RAM will already be met. An organisation responsible for regulatory compliance is likely to already have a strong foundation for the DPC RAM Legal basis and will probably already meet Level 3 or higher. The quality and process-oriented nature of GxP will likely mean that DPC RAM capabilities of (a) strategies, policies, and procedures, and (b) continuous improvement are likely to be already met.
However, there are some aspects of organisational support for archiving and preservation with which many life sciences organisations have difficulties. For example, the archiving function within an organisation can sometimes struggle to get the funding necessary to deliver archiving and preservation to the standards required, including training and skills for staff. Therefore, the DPC RAM requirements for organisational viability will often be a gap or weakness. Likewise, IT Services functions within life sciences organisations are often well developed but can lack the specific knowledge needed to support archiving and preservation, including the procurement of appropriate systems or hosted solutions. Therefore, the DPC RAM IT capability will often be an area that needs further improvement. Without this, the archive is unlikely to acquire the software solutions and support needed to be successful let alone an understanding of the technical aspects of digital preservation.
The extent to which an organisation needs to engage directly with the digital preservation community can vary. For example, whether to become members of the DPC, whether to attend digital preservation conferences such as iPRES, or whether to take digital preservation training courses. These are all valuable activities, but the organisation may not have the budget to commit to this level of engagement. Alternatives may already in place, for example exposure to digital preservation knowledge and training from organisations such as HSRAA or through working with vendors who specialise in LTDP and themselves have deep engagement with the digital preservation community.
DPC RAM Service Capabilities
The DPC RAM Service Capabilities cover the technical and workflow / SoP aspects of using LTDP to achieve Data Integrity. Therefore, it makes sense to map these to the ALCOA principles.
A summary of the mapping is shown in the table. The numbers in the table correspond to the level that will likely be required for each of the DPC RAM Service Capabilities (Acquisition transfer and ingest, Bitstream preservation, Content preservation, Metadata management, Discovery and Access).
There are 5 levels in DPC RAM:
- 0 – Minimal Awareness
- 1 – Awareness
- 2 – Basic
- 3 – Managed
- 4 – Optimised
As with the NDSA LoP, most of the entries in the table above have a range which reflects that the Level required will depend on what needs to be preserved, why, for how long, how the data needs to be made accessible and to whom.
Each of the mappings is explained in more detail below.
