Cambridge University Libraries inaugural Digital Preservation Policy

Cambridge University Libraries inaugural Digital Preservation Policy. Somaya Langley. Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge. 26 November 2018.
     The inaugural Cambridge University Libraries Digital Preservation Policy has been published. This can be compared to the Oxford Bodleian Libraries Digital Preservation Policy which was published earlier in the year. “Long-term preservation of digital content is essential to the University’s mission of contributing to society through the pursuit of education, learning, and research.” The is a "dearth of much-needed policies".

A gap analysis found that a few key policies existed, but there were gaps or duplication. The policy process is never ending. The policies should be a ‘live and breathing’ process, with the policy document itself purely being there to keep a record of the agreed upon decisions and principles."

The digital preservation policy process may need to also review other relevant policies (such as the Collection Care and Conservation Policy) and add digital preservation statements. "In the longer term, while it might be ideal to combine a preservation policy into one (encompassing the conservation and preservation of physical and digital collection items), CUL’s digital preservation maturity and skill capabilities are too low at present. Focus needed to be really drawn to how to manage digital content, hence the need for a separate Cambridge University Libraries Digital Preservation Policy." There is a need include statements to the policy to "support better care for digital (and audiovisual) content still remaining on carriers (that are yet to be transferred)."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Electronic Records Management Guidelines: Long-Term Preservation

Electronic Records Management Guidelines: Long-Term Preservation. March 2012, Version 5. Minnesota Historical Society. [Guidelines - Contents]

     Over the course of time, organizations generate many records. Some are of short term duration while others are to be kept permanently. “Tools such as migration, conversion, metadata, and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) will help you not only preserve your records, but also realize their full value.” Records need to be preserved, since “the greatest possible access to certain government information and data is essential to allow citizens to participate fully in a democratic system of government.”   

Some key concepts presented in the section on Long-Term Preservation:

1. Needs Assessment. Understanding the value of the records and the information they contain will help guide decisions, determine their retention requirements, the access and use of the records, as well as preservation options. 
2. Physical Storage Options. Record access requirements will help determine the type of storage to use, specifically
1. Online storage. Immediately available on the network
2. Near-line storage.  Records are stored in automated optical disk or tapes libraries attached to a network.
3. Offline storage.  Records are stored on removable media that must be retrieved manually.
3. File Format Options. For long-term file preservation, non-proprietary formats are preferred, but they also have limitations.
4. Digital Preservation Techniques. There are several approaches to ensure that electronic records remain useful over time.
1. Emulation. Using emulator programs to simulate the behavior, of original programs.
2. Encapsulation. Combining the object to be preserved with all of the necessary details of how to interpret it within a wrapper or package.
3. Migration. This is the more common approach, which is the process of  moving files to new media or computer systems to maintain their use. 
5. Preservation Planning.  “A preservation plan should address an institution’s overall preservation goals and provide a framework that defines the methods used to reach those goals.  At a minimum, the plan should define the collections covered by the plan, list the requirements of the records, practices and standards that are being followed, documentation of policies and procedures related to preservation activities, and staff responsibility for each preservation action.” This plan needs constant updating and cost/benefits must be addressed. Policies should be developed to put the plan into practice.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation with the Islandora Framework at Qatar National Library

Digital Preservation with the Islandora Framework at Qatar National Library. Armin Straube, Arif Shaon, Mohammed Abo Ouda. Poster, iPres 2016.  (Proceedings p. 270-271 / PDF p. 136).
     This poster outlines how Qatar National Library is creating a digital preservation solution. Their preservation strategy is to build a trustworthy digital repository based on established digital preservation and certification. The guiding principles that serve as benchmarks for their digital preservation efforts and which will inform its decision making process:

• Accessibility: permanent accessibility and usability
• Integrity: verify checksums, storage redundancies, monitoring and managing storage hardware.
• Persistent identifiers
• Metadata: capture technical metadata and record in PREMIS
• Preservation planning and risk assessment
• Standards compliance and trustworthiness
• Development and research via collaboration

The digital repository is based on Islandora integrated with Fedora Commons along with different preservation functions to be developed as Drupal modules. The repository stores image objects (digitized books, maps, photos etc.) in both tiff and jpeg2000 formats; audio-visual collections in mp4 and wav; and web archives in warc format from Heritrix.  The library will develop a file format policy that will enhance the basis of its risk assessment.

Digital Preservation Matters.

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.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation Program: Levels of Digital Preservation Support

Digital Preservation Program. South Dakota State Historical Society. 2015.
     A look at the South Dakota State Archives webpage concerning the levels of digital preservation.  They are committed to collecting, preserving, and providing access to their materials.

Levels of Digital Preservation Support:  The Archives has established three distinct levels of preservation support for digital archival materials that will be applied to digital materials at the time of accession. The levels are:

• Full Support:  The Archives will take all reasonable actions to maintain usability including migration, emulation, or normalization and will ensure data fixity for all original and transformed files and will provide access to transformed files.
• Limited Support:  The Archives will take limited steps to maintain usability and undertake strategic monitoring. They may actively transform a file from one format to another to mitigate format obsolescence, and will ensure data fixity for all original and transformed files and will provide access to transformed files.
• Basic Support: The Archives will provide access to the item in its submission file format only and will work to ensure data fixity of the submitted file. No transformations will be enacted on these files for preservation purposes.

The archives also has created a chart that outlines the preservation tasks associated with each level of preservation support. The tasks are:

• Create preservation metadata for accessibility, provenance, and management
• Perform fixity checks on a regular basis using proven checksum methods
• Periodically refresh storage media
• Provide for discovery of objects via online descriptive finding aid  
• Undertake strategic monitoring of file format
• Plan and perform file normalization if necessary
• Plan and perform migration to succeeding format upon obsolescence
• Offer long-term storage in a trusted preservation-worthy format

Digital Preservation Matters.

How many copies are needed for preservation?

How many copies are needed for preservation? Chris Erickson. 4 October 2016.
     An important component for preservation is to have multiple copies. The specific questions are: how many copies, how should they be stored, and where should they be located. Many people advocate the 3-2-1 rule for digital storage: three copies, stored on two different media, and one copy located off-site, preferably in areas with different disaster threats. (NARA; Library of Congress) The NDSA levels also incorporate this rule in the storage section.

The copies we have been looking at are:
     Copy 1: Rosetta storage on spinning disk in the campus data center
     Copy 2: Tape copies of our archive in the Granite Mountain Record Vault.

                    Annual Tape archive plus incremental transactional backups
     Copy 3: Internet copy, with DPN or Amazon Glacier
     Copy 4: Access copy within Special Collections on M-Discs or our CMS

What we choose to put in DPN will affect the third copy. We need to determine if these copies are adequate, and if not, then find different storage methods that are cost effective and fit within our workflow.

Additional posts:

• Expanding NDSA Levels of Preservation
• The NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation: An Explanation and Uses.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation Priorities: What to preserve?

Digital Preservation Priorities: What to preserve? Chris Erickson. 3 October 2016.
     Recently we have been reviewing the digital preservation policies that we have been working under. The current policy states that the subject specialists (curators, subject librarians, faculty members) who are responsible for a collection should decide what will be preserved in the Rosetta digital archive. They should know the library collection and the collecting policies, as well as the faculty and the university curriculum, and be able to decide what is worth preserving long term. We provide the Digital Preservation Decision Form to help them in their decisions. Currently the choices are to preserve, not to preserve, and the order in which collections needs to be processed.

The amount of content in our digital archive is increasing rapidly. As we plan for the future of the archive, there are questions raised about the number of archival copies, particularly when discussing what content should go into DPN. Those questions in turn raise other questions, including the question of preservation priorities. Are all objects equally important? If not, what are the most important objects or collections to preserve? Should we periodically revisit what is in the archive and deaccession content that is less important? In a world of finite resources we decided that we need to determine our preservation priorities in order to better preserve the important content.

Our goal is to preserve the important digital resources created in, or acquired by, or managed by the University Library and Archives. The proposed change is that the content preserved will be addressed according to the following guidelines, in descending order of importance:

1.      Unique University created content with no physical copy 

2.      Unique University owned items that are At-risk 

3.      Digital content in the library with a physical copy that may be at risk

4.      Digital content that would be difficult or costly to reproduce 

5.      Content digitized for convenience

We will be reviewing our digital collections and deciding if these priorities will help our selection and preservation processes, if they need to be revised, or if we need to go in another direction. We are also looking at implementing levels of preservation along with these priorities.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Preserving the Fruit of Our Labor: Establishing Digital Preservation Policies and Strategies

Preserving the Fruit of Our Labor: Establishing Digital Preservation Policies and Strategies at the University of Houston Libraries. Santi Thompson, et al. iPres 2015. November 2015.
     Paper that presents the library's digital preservation efforts. They formed a Digital Preservation Task Force to assess previous digital preservation practices and make recommendations on future efforts. The group was charged to establish a digital preservation policy; identify strategies, actions, and tools needed to sustain long-term access to library digital objects. The group was to look at:

• Define the policy’s scope and levels of preservation
• Articulate digital preservation priorities by outlining current practices, identifying preservation gaps and areas for improvement, and establishing goals to address gaps 
• Determine the tools, infrastructure, and other resources needed to address unmet needs and to sustain preservation activities in the future 
• Align priorities with digital preservation standards, best practices, and storage services
• Recommended roles, responsibilities, and next steps for implementing the strategy and policy 

The primary tool used for policy creation was  the Action Plan for Developing a Digital Preservation Program. It helps institutions establish a high-level framework with policies and procedures, and addressing resources to sustain a digital preservation program for the long term. The group also:

• Selected and studied Action Plan for Developing a Digital Preservation Program to construct digital preservation policies
• Drafted high-level policy framework
• Outlined roles and responsibilities for internal and external stakeholders
• Defined digital assets including digitization quality and metadata specifications; collection selection, acquisition policies, and procedures; and access and use policies
• Identified and described key functional entities for the digital preservation system, including ingest, archival storage,preservation planning and administration, and access
• Drafted potential start-up and ongoing costs for digital preservation
• Focused on evaluating software

Principles outlined in their Digital Preservation Policy include collaboration, partnerships, and technological innovation. As more library resources and services become digital, the responsibilities must expand to include the identification, stewardship, and preservation of designated digital content.

The Digital Preservation Policy consist of three main sections: Policy Framework, Policies and Procedures, and Technological Infrastructure. Sections in the Digital Preservation Policy Framework include:

• Purpose
• Objectives
• Mandate
• Scope
• Challenges
• Principles
• Roles and Responsibilities
• Collaboration
• Selection and Acquisition
• Access and Use

Policies and Procedures section describe digital preservation policies, procedures, roles, and responsibilities in greater detail than the policy framework. It outlines requirements concerning digital assets, including recommended specifications for digital objects, preferred file formats, personnel also acquisition, transfer, and access of content

Technological Infrastructure section outlines digital preservation system functions and requirements in greater detail than the policy framework and includes:

• The rules and requirements for Submission Information Packages (SIPs), Archival Information Packages (AIPs), and Dissemination Information Packages (DIPs)
• The workflow for ingesting, updating, storing, and managing digital objects
• The metadata requirements
• The strategic priorities for future digital preservation efforts and risk management

Digital Preservation Matters.

Applying DP Standards For Assessment & Planning

Applying DP Standards For Assessment & Planning. Bertram Lyons. PASIG 2016. March, 2016.
     ISO 16363:2012. Audit & Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories defines recommended practices for assessing the trustworthiness of digital repositories. The document will help those who audit repositories, but also those to design or redesign their digital repository processes. Some highlights from the standard:

3.1 Governance and Organizational viability: The repository shall have a collection policy or other document that specifies the type of information it will preserve, retain, manage, and provide access to. Without the policy the collection scope is unclear and it becomes difficult to say no to out of scope content. The standard expects a policy to exist and be documented.

4.2 Ingest: Creation of AIPs: Organizations should have a description of how AIPs are constructed from SIPs. It should document all changes to the processes, as well as defining what happens to the content (such as normalization of files, etc.)

5.2 Security Risk Management: The repository should have a written disaster preparedness and recovery plan, including at least one off-site backup of all preserved information together with an off-site copy of the recovery plan. This means the organization should be prepared administratively.

The elements are scored as follows

• 0 - non-compliant or not started
• 1 - slightly compliant (needs a lot of work to do in address the requirement.
• 2 - half compliant: partially addressed but still significant work to do
• 3 - mostly compliant: mostly addressed and working on full compliance.
• 4 - fully compliant: can demonstrate the requirement is comprehensively addressed.

Elements needed:

• Documentation: records of policy, procedure, and outcomes of activities
• Policy: the definition of approaches and protocol for repository functions and procedures
• Procedures: specification of preservation and infrastructure management activities
• Software: development or configuration of preservation systems
• Infrastructure: procurement, monitoring, and management of hardware infrastructure
• Organization: organizational infrastructure including funding, staffing, and strategy
• Action Plan

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Human Face of Digital Preservation: Organizational and Staff Challenges and Initiatives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France

The Human Face of Digital Preservation: Organizational and Staff Challenges and Initiatives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.  Emmanuelle Bermès, Louise Fauduet.  iPres, October 2009.  [Video, full paper, slides]
     Great presentation. The National Library has been working for several years on their digital preservation efforts, with the Spar  project (Système de Préservation et d'Archivage Réparti). They are looking at the human aspects of their digital projects. The library has become digital as a whole, which was a major change. Earlier the digit library was treated differently from the rest of the library. Originally the digital side was led by experts or early adopters who were learning by doing and were organized separately from the rest of the library workflows. Digital definitely meant "different". Now the library has become digital, which means  they have regular production teams running operational projects for digital content and digital preservation.  All organizations within the library are involved in these tasks and there are formal training processes. The library shifted and part of this was a large scale shift in the scale of content digitized, as well as making digital activities closely related with traditional library skills. If you want to disseminate the digital activities through out the library you have to disseminate the tasks and the people as well. You have to take the time to train everyone and move slowly to bring all people along, or you leave people behind.

Many of the digital activities can be related to the other workflows, like ingest and acquisitions, metadata, cataloging, etc. Relate traditional librarian skills with digital skills; digital can be built on traditional library knowledge. Help integrate the digital by having common projects that people can work together on. It is important to take time to stop and look back at what has been done and talk about it. Difficult to take advantage of what has been done if you don't review. The library took time to move the conceptual OAIS model into the reality of the library organization, to decide how does it really fit, define roles and decide how the employees would interact.

The Library created a digital training curriculum and opened it up to everyone in the library to learn. "This training includes an introduction to digital libraries, digital documents, and digital preservation, and then three optional tutorials, one on metadata and protocols (including semantic web technologies), one on user oriented design (including usage studies, accessibility and usability, and the Web 2.0), and one on digitization and preservation (including rights management, preservation metadata and persistent identifiers)." They had to draw a line between those who wanted the training for their job, or those who were just curious. They started a project about organizations and human resources under digital influence to better understand the digital library and their people. Six wishes:

1. Clarify the institution’s policy and digital strategic vision
2. Define priorities 
3. Define what a digital collection is
4. Facilitate transverse workflows that span easily across organizational borders
5. Develop digital skills
6. Analyze job qualifications, revisiting job requirements and updating staff skills

Digital Preservation Matters.

Assessing Digital Preservation at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library

Assessing Digital Preservation at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Alice Sara Prael, Abbey Potter. The Signal. March 2, 2016.
      The question is with all the data in the library holdings, how to preserve the digital files over the long term? The goal of the project is to ‘develop a long-range digital preservation strategy’ to address all digital archival holdings at the Library. This challenging goal consists of three phases:

1. assess current infrastructure against community standards and make brief recommendations on how to improve digital preservation practices
2. explore potential solutions to address the recommendations made in the first phase
3. determine a single path forward based on the solutions explored and create an action plan for how to implement that solution.

Plans started by interviewing archivists and IT personnel about their processes and how they use the systems and then research the systems. Like many cultural heritage institutions, is in need of better documentation. The biggest gap in the existing documentation for digital archives is a digital preservation policy which is a record of decisions, including those that have been made but not documented or documented elsewhere. Important community standards and guidelines include

• ISO 14721: Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), 
• ISO 16363: Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories,
• the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Levels of Digital Preservation

Each of these items gives a slightly different perspective on what is required for digital preservation. With limited resources and staff time it’s important to recognize when to aim for “good enough” digital preservation, which can be defined for each institution by "the available resources, the needs of the collection, and priorities of the institution".  The NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation are not as in depth as but they are easier to understand. The intermediary levels can address digital preservation in a phased approach and also create a way for identifying strengths and weaknesses. Once the NDSR project is complete the Library will have a picture of the digital practices and a clear implementation plan for improved digital preservation.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Developing a Born-Digital Preservation Workflow

Developing a Born-Digital Preservation Workflow. Jack Kearney, Bill Donovan. April 8, 2014.
     Presentation that looks at developing a systematic approach to preserving digitally born collections. The example from Boston College are the Mary O’Hara papers. This was an opportunity for a collaborative project involving the Digital Libraries, Archives, and the Irish Music Center.

• Important elements of the workflow:
• Chain of Custody, 
• Digital Forensics, 
• Computed initial checksums, 
• File/folder names, 
• Local Archival Copies, Distributed Digital Preservation

“Digital forensics focuses on the use of hardware and software tools to collect, analyze, interpret, and present information from digital sources, and ensuring that the collected information has not been altered in the process.” The presentation has some specific steps and procedures in ways to not alter the information, including multiple copies, write blockers, and such. In working with external drives, they would build and output an inventory taken with this Unix command:
     :  find directory-name  -type f -exec ls -l {} ; >c:\data\MOH\inventory.txt

Local conventions regarding naming files and folders:

• Use English alphabet and numbers 0 - 9
• Avoid punctuation marks other than underscores or hyphens.
• Do not use spaces.
• Limit file/folder names to 31 characters, including the 3 digit extension . Prefer shorter names.
• Decision: They may remediate folder and file names, but only for the working copies.

They also look for files that need actions taken:

• Any files off-limits or expendable? System files,
• Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
• Unsupported Formats (Can normalize using Xena)
• They also use a variety of tools, such as: FITS,  JHove 

Important to keep track of digital preservation actions:

• File migrations
• Obsolete file formats
• Proprietary file formats
• Metadata changes

Digital Preservation Matters.

Policy Planning from iPres

Policy Planning from iPres. Alice Prael. Blog. November 5, 2015.
     Report on the Policy and Practice Documentation Clinic at iPres organized by Maureen Pennock and Nancy McGovern. SCAPE has a collection of published preservation policies that she is using to create a policy framework. The Policy and Practice Clinic showed the importance of taking the time to create a policy and not trying to do it all at once. Some notes from the post:

• Create a Digital Preservation Principles
• Include key stakeholders when working with the principles document, early and often
• Write what digital preservation actions are happening now
• Start writing a Digital Preservation Plan. Nancy McGovern: A policy is ‘what we do’ and a plan is ‘what we will do.’
• Create Procedure Documents to show how to follow the principles
• Have the key stakeholders decide if the procedures are realistic

Some additional notes on the Policy and Practice Clinic:

• If your institution doesn’t like the word ‘preservation’ then use ‘long term access.’ 
• Do what is needed to get the buy-in from the stakeholders. 
• Make the technology enforce the digital preservation policy for you.
• People are much more likely to perform these preservation tasks if the system doesn’t give them a choice.

More information on iPres here:

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation: A Planning Guide for the Five Colleges

Digital Preservation: A Planning Guide for the Five Colleges. Five Colleges Consortium website. 2014. [PDF]
     This Digital Preservation Planning Guide is designed to help institutions who are starting their digital preservation activities. The first part of the Guide is a checklist of the six essential action items for starting a digital preservation program:

1. Create a digital preservation policy
2. Identify and document workflows, standards, and best practices
3. Identify and document short-term data security practices
4. Manage digital objects
5. Identify and capture metadata necessary for preservation
6. Develop a migration plan

The second part provides "explanations, examples, and advice for completing the six action items" to help with the planning and to find common ground for potential future collaboration.

Create a digital preservation policy which will help achieve several fundamental digital preservation goals:

• Define digital preservation and the scope of preservation efforts.
• Get administrator buy-in, which becomes a tool for ensuring institutional support and program sustainability.
• Encourage the institution to review current digital programs and define the scope of future efforts.

General Steps:

• Advocate for the necessity of a digital preservation policy
• Organize all stakeholders to form a policy committee
• Develop the process for approving the policy
• Review example policies
• Draft the policy
• Solicit feedback from campus community and review periodically
• Schedule periodic review
• Identify and document workflows, standards, and best practices
• Identify and Document short-term data security practices
• Manage digital objects
• Identify stored digital objects and their components
• Determine which components should be preserved
• Ensure integrity of digital objects regardless of system used to store or provide access
• Identify and capture metadata necessary for preservation
• Develop a migration plan

Digital Preservation Matters.

5 Open Source Digital Preservation Tools to Assist Enterprise Archiving

5 Open Source Digital Preservation Tools to Assist Enterprise Archiving. Christopher J. Michael. Paragon Solutions. December 15, 2015.
     General article about digital preservation and some useful tools. "Digital archiving and preservation are needed to ensure the authenticity, integrity, and protection of electronic records despite limited resources and a constant stream of new complex technologies. "

• "Digital preservation is the foundation of enterprise archiving."
• "Electronic records are archived when they have long-term retention needs in order to fulfil legal, business and regulatory requirements."
• A digital archive is a repository to store collections of digital objects to provide long-term access to the information.

There are some useful tools to help with the challenges of archiving and obsolescence:

1. Matchbox: software to identify duplicate images.
2. DROID: identify and standardize file formats and metadata extraction.
3. Xena (XML Electronic Normalising for Archives): detect the file formats of objects and convert them into into open formats.
4. ePADD: supports the appraisal, ingest, processing, discovery, and delivery of email archives.
5.  Web Curator Tool: a tool for harvesting websites for archiving with descriptive metadata.

A clearly documented digital preservation policy that includes standard file formats and that is followed consistently will help ensure that objects in the archive will be available long term.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories

Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories. Gabriela Redwine, et al. Council on Library and Information Resources. October 2013. [PDF]
     "Until recently, digital media and files have been included in archival acquisitions largely as an afterthought." People may not have understood how to deal with digital materials, or staff may not be prepared to manage digital acquisitions. The object is to offer guidance to rare book and manuscript dealers, donors, repository staff, and other custodians to help ensure that digital materials are handled, documented appropriately, and arrive at repositories in good condition, and each section provides recommendations for donors, dealers, and repository staff..

The sections of the report cover:

• Initial Collection Review
• Privacy and Intellectual Property
• Key Stages in Acquiring Digital Materials
• Post-Acquisition Review by the Repository
• Appendices, which include: 
• Potential Staffing Activities for the Repository
• Preparing for the Unexpected: Recommendations
• Checklist of Recommendations for Donors and Dealers, and Repositories

Some thoughts and quotes from the report:

• it is vital to convince all parties to be mindful of how they handle, document, ship, and receive digital media and files.
• Early communication also helps repository staff take preliminary steps to ensure the archival and file integrity, as well as the usability of digital materials over time.
• A repository’s assessment criteria may include technical characteristics, nature of the relationship between born-digital and paper materials within a collection, information about context and content, possible transfer options, and particular preservation challenges.
• Understand if there is a possibility that the digital records include the intellectual property of people besides the creator or donor of the materials.
• Clarify in writing what digital materials will be transferred by a donor to a repository
  (e.g., hard drives, disks, e-mail archives, websites)
• It is strongly recommended that donors and dealers seek the
  guidance of archival repositories before any transfer takes place.
• To avoid changing the content, formatting, and metadata associated with the files, repositories
  must establish clear protocols for the staff’s handling of these materials.

The good practices in this report can help reduce archival problems with digital materials. "Early
archival intervention in records and information management will help shape the impact on archives of user and donor idiosyncrasies around file management and data backup."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Published Preservation Policies

Published Preservation Policies. Carl Wilson, Barbara Sierman. Scape. Aug 11, 2015.
    The SCAPE project gathered a number of policies "concerning the creation of the Policy Framework". Other sources, such as a report in the Signal, Analysis of Current Digital Preservation Policies: Archives, Libraries and Museums, by Madeline Sheldon, were helpful when creating this overview of published preservation policies. The policies are divided in four categories:

•     Libraries
•     Archives
•     Data Centers
•     Miscellaneous

These policies are not all "preservation policies" and may be published under different headings.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Another successful work meeting on ontologies

Another successful work meeting on ontologies. Johannes Biermann. Pericles Blog. 10 August 2015.
The Centre for Research & Technology, Hellas (CERTH) hosted a technical workshop on the Linked Resource Model (LRM), the LRM service, domain ontologies, ecosystem model and policies.
Discussion of the progress on the domain ontologies and how the concept of “resource” has been adapted. Other topics included:

• Art & Media domain ontologies
  Art & Media domain ontologies, to make them useable for the concrete scenario and for similar scenarios. 
• The Science domain ontology uses Topic Maps to organise the knowledge with index and thesaurus 
• The Ecosystem ontology has  a simplified graphical view of the ontology, with agents of different types, simplified dependency types,  significance of the resources, and refinement of the process and policy elements.
• Linked Resource Model (LRM), including changes and the new features
• Linked Resource Model service that includes dynamic parts that can be used to express time, activities, actions, versions and rules.
• Roles of policies and how they are handled, the tools that drive the policies and how they can be tested. 

Digital Preservation Matters.

NARA Bulletin 2015-02: Guidance on Managing Electronic Messages

NARA Bulletin 2015-02: Guidance on Managing Electronic Messages. National Archives. July 29, 2015.
     Bulletin from the National Archives to the heads federal agencies proving records management guidance for electronic messages, specifically for text messaging, chat/instant messaging, messaging functionality in social media tools or applications, voice messaging, and similar forms of electronic messaging systems. There are a wide variety of systems and tools that create electronic messages, and this bulletin is to help develop strategies for managing those electronic messages. Electronic messages created or received in the course of business are records and like all records, they must be scheduled for disposition.
There are challenges with managing these types of messages, which should be met by:

• Develop policies on electronic messages that address some of the challenges 
• Update policies when new tools are deployed
• Provide appropriate tools for employees to manage their work
• Determine a strategy to manage and capture content created in those systems
• Train employees to identify and capture electronic messages
• Use third-party services to capture messages
• Ensure electronic messages, metadata and attachments can be exported from the original system for long term preservation.
• Create a retention guideline for electronic messages to meet business, audit, and access needs
• Personal accounts should only be used in exceptional circumstances. 
• Provide clear instructions to all employees on their responsibility to capture electronic messages created or received in personal accounts

Related posts: 

•  Australian electronic books to be preserved under new laws 
• WebPreserver - Collect Web & Social Media as Legally Admissible Evidence 
• The Many Uses of Rhizome’s New Social Media Preservation Tool. 
• Bill targets messy e-records - May 9, 2008 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Managing Chaos Through Digital Governance

Managing Chaos Through Digital Governance. Patrick K. Burke, Lisa Welchman. CIO Insight. March 23, 2015.
     An interview that discusses digital governance and change. Organizations should have a digital leadership who, with the executive level, should initiate a digital strategy. If the digital strategy does not tie in to the organizational goals then problems result. Digital strategies that start at the bottom of an organization and are built only on a foundation of digital best practices may be helpful but may not accomplish what the organization needs.  Organizations need to make sure that digital area experts make decisions about digital standards after getting input from key stakeholders. It is the stakeholders that know what is supposed to be happening.

• Chaos has a way of slipping into an organization and creating problems that grow exponentially over time. 
• With so much innovation, collaboration and bottom-line focused initiatives involving digital assets, there is a very real need to provide a framework to manage this change. Digital governance helps with this process.  
• The opposite of digital governance is making it up and funding it as you go along, maintaining a project instead of operational view when it comes to digital. 
• The golden rule is if you know what you are making, how you are making it and who is supposed to be making it, then you ought to be governing firmly, particularly if you are trying to bring something to scale. 
• If you are just exploring, then some chaos can be good. That’s why I often recommend that digital teams maintain a research and development component that gets to explore the chaos.

Digital Preservation Matters.