Heratio Help Center article. Category: Digital Preservation.

Preservation Maturity Self-Assessment

A Guide for Repository Administrators

What is the Preservation Maturity dashboard?

The Preservation Maturity dashboard scores your repository, from concrete evidence in its own records, against the five functional areas of the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation. It tells you, at a glance, how mature your digital preservation practice is and what to do next.

It lives at Admin -> Preservation maturity (/admin/preservation-maturity) and is available to administrators only. It is read-only: it never changes a record and runs no background jobs.

The NDSA Levels

The NDSA (National Digital Stewardship Alliance) Levels of Digital Preservation are a widely used, jurisdiction-neutral self-assessment grid. They group preservation practice into five functional areas, each graded from Level 1 (know your content) through Level 4 (repair your content). This dashboard adds a "Not yet" grade for an area where the repository holds no qualifying evidence at all, so an empty instance reads honestly rather than claiming a phantom Level 1.

The five areas scored:

1. Storage and geographic location - multiple copies of every file, held in geographically separate locations and across different storage providers or systems, with managed replication.
2. Integrity (fixity and write protection) - cryptographic checksums recorded for every file, verified on a cadence, with content protected from accidental change or deletion, and corrupted content repaired from a known-good copy.
3. Information security and access control - explicit control over who can read or change content, with an audit trail of who did what, and regular review of those logs.
4. Metadata - descriptive, administrative, technical, and standard preservation (PREMIS) metadata held for content.
5. Content and file formats - knowing what formats you hold, identifying them to the PRONOM standard (PUID), and monitoring formats for obsolescence so at-risk content can be migrated.

How the scoring works

The score for each area is evidence-based and deliberately conservative. The dashboard only ever counts what the platform actually tracks:

• Storage reads your configured replication targets and how diverse they are (local, SFTP, S3, and so on), plus whether replication has actually run.
• Integrity reads recorded checksums (including the algorithm used), whether fixity verification has been run, and whether retention policies or legal holds protect content from change.
• Information security reads your permission groups, security classifications, and the audit logs for change actions, read access, and authentication.
• Metadata reads descriptive titles, administrative and provenance events, technical metadata captured for digital files, and PREMIS preservation events.
• File formats reads recorded MIME types, PRONOM (PUID) identifications, the diversity of formats held, and a monitored format risk registry.

Where the platform holds no evidence for a practice, the area is graded lower and a clear recommendation is shown. Absence is never inflated into a higher score.

The overall maturity is the lowest level achieved across the five areas - a preservation programme is only as strong as its weakest area.

Reading the dashboard

• The summary card at the top shows your overall level and the framework note.
• Each of the five areas has its own card with a big level badge, a progress bar, an Evidence line (what was found), and a Next step line (the gap to close to reach the next level).

Work through the "Next step" recommendations area by area to raise your scores.

Frequently asked questions

Does this change any records? No. The dashboard is entirely read-only.

Why does an area say "Not yet"? Because the repository holds no qualifying evidence for that area yet (for example, no checksums recorded, or no format identification performed). Follow the "Next step" recommendation to establish Level 1.

Is this specific to one country's regulations? No. The NDSA Levels are a generic, jurisdiction-neutral framework. The dashboard uses them without any country-specific framing.