Friday, October 14, 2016

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

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