Resumen de Characterization of designated communities of geospatial legacy information and their application in appraisal and digital preservation decisions: a case study
Institutions that recognize the value of digital geographic legacy data for future use develop the motivation to preserve the data for the long term. International standards on preservation, such as for an open archival information system (OAIS), require having one or more designated communities identified for whom to preserve the data to adjust preservation measures to the communities’ needs. Lacking scientific literature about designated communities and the way to identify them, we use qualitative research methods to build basic knowledge on western culture user communities of legacy geodata (goal one) and to use this knowledge to adapt existing preservation practice, specifically appraisal, of the Institute for Cartography and Geology in Catalonia (goal two). The Delphi method and focus group interviews are used to reach these goals. As results, we get characteristics of thirteen user types of different professional profiles. We show that they can be clustered into six groups, of which four are relevant to a long-term archive: geographers, historians, urban planners and the general public. Through interviewing members of these four clusters, we extracted characteristics that are mentioned by various preservation guidelines as relevant for appraisal and selection of geodata: the interaction type with the data (interaction type), the data age range users are interested in (time range), their technological knowledge and in particular knowledge of geographic information systems (GIS knowledge), the maximal time span between data acquisition they could work with (acquisition interval), the preferred type of product, scales and file formats and the significance of the user group. The resulting picture of the Catalonian users was employed to recommend a relevant designated community to the ICGC and to illustrate how that might influence detailed appraisal decisions for part of their production. Users input also allowed us to evaluate the importance of existing appraisal criteria for geodata.
Thanks to triangulation of the Delphi study results with the user input we can conclude that the Delphi method is an efficient way to predict legacy geodata user profile characteristics. Nevertheless, direct user interaction reveals far more details that can influence preservation decisions. Practical application of the profiles showed that some modules were not useful for appraisal; e.g., file formats. By applying what we have learned about user needs to appraisal criteria and other preservation decisions we give the user a voice that will compete in the final decisions about implementations of user-adapted legacy geodata preservation with technical, organizational and legal aspects.
