Heratio Help Center article. Category: Digital Preservation.

Preservation Maturity Self-Assessment (human-entered)

A Guide for Repository Administrators

What is the maturity self-assessment?

The Preservation Maturity Self-Assessment is where your institution rates its own digital-preservation practice, section by section, against a recognised international maturity model, records the ratings with evidence notes, and tracks how the profile changes over time.

It lives at Admin -> Preservation maturity self-assessment (/admin/preservation-self-assessment) and is available to administrators only.

It complements the computed Preservation Maturity dashboard (/admin/preservation-maturity). The two are deliberately different things:

A mature programme uses both: the computed dashboard is an honest mirror of what the system can evidence, while the self-assessment captures organisational realities (policy, legal basis, staffing, strategy) that no automated probe can see.

The maturity models

Two widely used, jurisdiction-neutral models are supported (no country assumptions are made; both are international).

NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation

Five functional areas, each self-rated on a 0 (not yet) to 4 scale:

1. Storage - multiple copies with geographic and provider diversity
2. Integrity (fixity) - checksums recorded, verified on a cadence, content protected
3. Control (security) - who can read or change content is restricted and logged
4. Metadata - descriptive, administrative, technical and preservation (PREMIS) metadata
5. Content (file formats) - format identification (PRONOM/PUID), diversity, obsolescence monitoring

DPC Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM)

Eleven sections (three organisational, eight service-capability), each rated 0 to 4:

• Organisational viability
• Policy and strategy
• Legal basis
• IT capability
• Continuous improvement
• Acquisition, transfer and ingest
• Bitstream preservation
• Content preservation
• Metadata management
• Discovery and access
• Reuse

The 0 to 4 maturity scale

The shared scale labels are: 0 Minimal awareness, 1 Awareness, 2 Basic, 3 Managed, 4 Optimised. These labels (and the list of models) come from the Dropdown Manager (groups assessment_model and maturity_level), so an administrator can rename or extend them under Admin -> Dropdowns without touching code.

Running an assessment

1. Open Admin -> Preservation maturity self-assessment.
2. In Start a new assessment, choose the model (NDSA or DPC RAM), optionally give it a title, an assessor and a date, then Begin assessment.
3. On the rating form, for each section pick the level that best describes your practice. Each level shows a short descriptor so you know what it means. Add an Evidence / notes entry to record the justification.
4. Save draft to keep working, or Save and mark complete when finished.
5. You land on the maturity profile - a radar of section levels plus horizontal bars and your overall (average) maturity.

The profile and progress over time

• The profile page shows one assessment as a CSS radar and per-section bars, with each section's evidence note and the overall average maturity.
• The landing page lists every past assessment and draws a small trend per model, so you can see whether your maturity is improving release over release.
• Export JSON downloads a self-contained snapshot of an assessment (model, metadata, every section with its level, label and evidence, plus the overall average) for reporting, sharing with funders, or feeding into a wider dashboard.

Notes

• The self-assessment is entirely separate from your records: it only ever writes to its own two tables and never changes a catalogue description.
• It is admin-only and resilient - a fresh or mid-migration install shows a calm "being set up" state rather than an error.
• The models are seeded as data; the level descriptors are taken from the published NDSA Levels v2.0 and the DPC Rapid Assessment Model.