A recent International Journal of Digital Curation article discussed the longer term threats to archives, not least what happens to an asset created under project funding? For digital as for physical resources, project funding and subsequent maintenance are misaligned.
That article focuses on substantial archives whose core holdings were recognised and can be articulated in a retention plan. What though of marginal content which may have been embraced by an enthusiastic administrator during the project funded phase?
Broadly, any project which creates and presents local history should beware the benevolent helping hand of the local Council. The Council may well have a Content Management System which displays local Community Council records; they may suggest that storage is cheap so they can also present complementary local research on the history of the locale. It looks good: the local historians can feel pleased to see their effort on the "official " site; but, but... the longer term retention is less clear.
When searching on a topic, one can find tantalising traces of lost memories - assets which had been developed with passion but have since disappeared.
Often the wider content structure has changed. It is in the nature of software package providers to try to turn the screw on their "legacy" customer base; it is in the nature of those customers to look elsewhere and begin an optimistic cost-saving migration project. Once that commences, non-core items don't have a clear target placement, and look increasingly anomalous - bothersome noise rather than valued assets. As the project completion pressure increases, the project manager's natural tendency is to descope. Their objective is to proclaim job-done and move on.
No surprise then that community history records are trampled underfoot. They have no clear stakeholder ownership within the organisation, no clearly articulated target within or outwith the organisation.
I am sceptical that proceduralising data retention plans will help these survive. Better to adopt lowest-common-denominator storage and indexing. Portability and easy replication are more likely to guarantee that local archives survive in some reusable form.
