How the National Library established autonomous product team organisation

Abstract

The National Library of Norway is an archive that collects a wide range of different media. Text, images, sound, moving images, web archiving, etc. For years, we were organized as a traditional hierarchical organization. Due to the complexity of operations and size of our organization, we were struggling with a myriad of stakeholders, which again led to challenges in prioritizing competing goals. Our IT resources were acting as a bottleneck, again suffering from constant context switching. Digital preservation was everyone's—and no one's—responsibility and was mostly viewed as an IT challenge. In 2022, a new organizational structure was introduced. It established autonomous interdisciplinary product teams consisting of both IT resources and expert resources from the various media departments. As part of this reorganization, digital preservation was established as a *product* at the National Library with its own team. The digital preservation team now develops digital preservation as a product and offers it as a service to other interdisciplinary teams in the organization. This new team organization has led to a much more focused approach to digital preservation within the organization. Over the last year, we have made significant progress in the digital preservation field, establishing road maps, strategies, and principles, while reporting regularly to a "board" of product owners. We would like to provide a brief overview of our previous challenges, our reorganization, and the beneficial impact that having a dedicated digital preservation team can have on an organization.

Details

Creators

Torbjørn Pedersen

Institutions

Date

2024-09-18 11:20:00 +0100

Keywords

governance, resourcing, and management for dp; start 2 preserve

Publication Type

lightning talk

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0)

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Collaborative Notes

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