Monday, October 24, 2016

Our Preservation Levels

Our Preservation Levels. Chris Erickson. October 24, 2016.
     After looking at the levels used by various groups, we have decided on 4 levels for our preservation plan. We want to keep it simple so that it is not difficult to determine and that it is meaningful for our workflows. Our Rosetta preservation system is a dark archive that can harvest digital materials from several publicly accessible content management systems. The curator or subject specialist for the collection will determine the level of preservation together with the preservation priority and will indicate that on the Digital Preservation Decision Form.

The Preservation Levels
0.   No preservation. Regular backups only (for example: Shared network drive that is  backed up regularly by IT)
1.   Basic preservation. A copy on M-Disc in Special Collections besides an access copy in our CMS, which is backed up by IT. No other preservation processing
2.   Full preservation. A master copy in Rosetta, with format migration, descriptive and preservation metadata, fixity checks, multiple copies (tape, data center, Granite Mountain Vault)
3.  Extended preservation. Full preservation services plus either DPN or remote/internet storage copy for materials that are appropriate for DPN
The intention is to recognize that some materials do not need full preservation services, nor long term storage in DPN. We will evaluate the levels next year and see if they are working the way we expect.

2 comments:

Bryson said...

Interesting way of looking at your preservation levels. I might have advocated for something below "Full Preservation" in my environment that would be "Full Preservation" without format migration but I think overall that what you have done here makes a lot of sense. I definitely like the idea of keeping the levels relatively simple like you have done.

I have also been wondering what places that have their own preservation system might do about how the work with placing items in DPN. Again, I think you have a reasonable approach.

Chris Erickson said...

Thanks for your comments, and good to hear from you. I’m not sure if this is the best way, but we have thought about it for a long time. I wondered about the format migration, but since they are in Rosetta it seemed to make sense to manage the formats for everything there. For DPN, we have decided that for now we will only use the 5 TB as part of the membership and not purchase additional TBs. So that means I have to get the priority and level and combine that with the disk space in Rosetta, then export it from Rosetta to the DPN portal. There is no report that gives the Rosetta disk space, so we had to create our own to do that.

It will be interesting to see how it all works together.