A very concise and compact report from Ricky Erway, OCLC Research, 

http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-06r.html

Ricky’s report addresses some of the very basic challenges in Digital Preservation in the real world.

Are you sure that your organization adressed these issues already, can you tick all the boxes, provide tangible proof and evidence that your systems and workflow fully adress this “starter requirement for digital preservation of born digital media”?

Trusted Repositories, Compliance and Certification are all heavily discussed topics in the Digital Preservation Community. What about the real world of ingesting digital content and media. How do we manage long term access? We are living in world with lots of practical challenges some policy related, others IT Governance. This report reflects the different aspects and as the title expicitely indicates, these are just the first steps.

Certification and Compliance is in essence a good development, as long as it connects to the real world. At the end of the day it is about proving evidence. It is like swimming, you can have lots of swimming certificates but that does not necessarily prove that you can survive outside an olympic pool.