Fixity Working Group

The Fixity Working Group was originally established May 31, 2016 as a joint collaboration of the Standards & Practices Interest Group and the Infrastructure Interest Group in order to move forward with reccomendations from the Fixity Guidance Report and the NDSA National Agenda. The Fixity Working Group created the Fixity Survey as a way to address the “… clear need for use-case driven examples of best practices for fixity in particular system designs and configurations established to meet particular preservation requirements” raised in the 2015 NDSA National Agenda. The survey set a baseline for activities being done in 2016. Future work will build off of these initial results and work towards developing longitudinal studies.

The Fixity Working Group started up for the second time in April of 2021 and completed work in October 2021. The report and associated documents can be found on the 2021 Fixity Survey OSF site.

Contact Us

While the most recent survey work is complete, if you have any questions or are interested in working on the next iteration of this survey in a few years, please contact the Fixity Working Group at NDSA-Fixity [@] lists [dot] clir [dot] org.

2021 Activities and Products

The 2021 Fixity Working group:

  • Reviewed the 2017 Fixity Survey report and survey questions
  • Developed a set of survey questions for 2021
  • Deployed the 2021 survey
  • Reviewed and analyzed the results
  • Wrote case studies after interviewing interested organizations
  • Wrote a final report based off of the 2021 survey responses, including the case studies

The group produced:

  • The 2021 Fixity Survey Report documents the results of the 2021 survey and compares these with the 2017 results when applicable. In addition, the 2021 Report includes case studies documenting how fixity is used with each organization building on the findings of the survey itself.
  • Case studies documenting how various instutions handle fixity are included in the report.
  • The survey data and a crosswalk between the 2017 and 2021 survey questions is also on the NDSA OSF page.

2021 Working Group Members

  • Carol Kussmann (co-chair)
  • Sibyl Schaefer (co-chair)
  • Robin Dean
  • Katherine Fischer
  • Martin Gengenbach
  • Kimberly Gianfrancesco
  • Nick Krabbenhoeft
  • Jenny Mitcham
  • Max Prud’homme

2016-2017 Products and Activities

  • The Fixity Working Group met at Digital Preservation 2016 to foster “a next-level conversation on optimization, parameters, routines, resources & algorithms”. Notes from the conversation are available here.
  • A subgroup of people looked into vendor fixity requirements and produced Vendor Fixity: An Attempt at Definition a report of their findings for the NDSA Leadership. The goal was to determine if there was a simpler method by which potential users could do a cross comaprison of how various servies defined fixity.
  • The 2017 Fixity Survey Report was produced by the group documenting fixity practices across the community. The code book and data is also available on the same OSF site.