Do you work at an organization that stewards digital content for long-term preservation? If so, we’d like to hear from you about staffing for digital preservation at your organization. The 2025 NDSA Staffing Survey is designed to gain insight into current and ideal staffing for digital preservation programs.

The 2025 Staffing Survey is meant to be answered by individuals and there is no limit on the number of individual respondents per organization. Responses are sought from individuals worldwide with current digital preservation responsibilities at their organization, ranging from practitioners to department managers to senior leadership. You do not need to be an NDSA member to answer this survey.

Follow this link to access the survey. It is available until Friday, October 3, 2025 and is expected to take approximately 20-25 minutes to complete. To assist with completing the survey, a PDF preview of all of the survey questions can be viewed in advance by following this link.

The 2025 survey incorporates a few new questions and minor updates to make the survey more user-friendly and improve the reliability of the results. While we strive to keep the survey as consistent as possible to enable longitudinal data analysis, we recognize that each iteration presents an opportunity to improve upon the last survey. To that end, we welcome all feedback about how future instances of the survey can be improved, and we encourage participants to submit their comments at the survey’s end.

Interested in the results of 2012, 2017, and 2021 NDSA staffing reports? The code books, data, and reports are available in the NDSA OSF.

If you have questions or concerns about this survey, please contact the survey co-chairs Rachel Appel (rappel [at] upenn [dot] edu) and Hannah Wang (hannah_wang [at] sec [dot] senate [dot] gov) and include “Staffing Survey” in the subject line.

Thank you for helping NDSA and our community advance digital preservation!

-The NDSA Staffing Survey Working Group