Grading Degradation in an Institutionally Managed Repository

Abstract

It is not unusual for digital collections to degrade and suffer from problems associated with unexpected change. In an analysis of the ACM conference list, we found that categorizing the degree of change affecting a digital collection over time is a difficult task. More specifically, we found that categorizing this degree of change is not a binary problem where documents are either unchanged or they have changed so dramatically that they do not fit within the scope of the collection. It is, in part, a characterization of the intent of the change. In this work, we examine and categorize the various degrees of change that digital documents endure within the boundaries of an institutionally managed repository.