Thursday, January 07, 2016

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

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