Checklists for creating a preservation policy
Organizational
- Selection/acquisition
- Is the object important in the context of the institution's core holdings or collection strengths?
- Does the object fit into the current or planned digital preservation infrastructure of the institution?
- Roles and responsibilities
- Is the institution the primary holder of record for the digital object?
- Has the institution incurred any responsibilities or restrictions for access to the object?
- Retention/deselection
- Are there other institutions with greater capacity or expertise in the type of the object at hand?
- Does the object fit with the continuing mission of the institution?
Media
- Choosing a media type to use:
- Does the media type have multi-vendor support for hardware readers and media manufacturing?
- Is the media resilient to environmental fluctuations? What are the recommended environmental conditions for long-term preservation and does the institution have the capacity to provide those conditions?
- How vulnerable is the media to accidental alteration?
- Can the media withstand handling? What are the handling conditions of the media?
- Managing the media:
- How long between checks for media readability and integrity? Between media replacement?
- Is there an identified offsite location? How often will the offsite store be updated?
- Is there an asset tracking system in place for media and how will media be labelled/identified?
Formats
- Choosing archival formats:
- Does the format have broad support in viewers/editors?
- Is the format open/non-proprietary and does it have published specifications?
- Does the format have support for including metadata?
- Does the format support significant properties of the original (if a digital surrogate)?
- Does the format support lossless compression or no compression/encryption?
- Managing files:
- Is the version of software that created the file recorded? Is the current version recorded?
- How often are format emulators/migrators identified and investigated?
- What data loss would constitute a loss of a significant property for the format?
Metadata
- General
- Can the digital objects use a global standard or is there a compelling reason to create a local standard?
- Resource discovery/descriptive
- Does the standard meet the discipline or domain requirements?
- Does the standard chosen address interoperability/general resource discovery needs?
- Structural
- Does the standard chosen address the types of aggregation important to the collection?
- Administrative/preservation
- Is there an authenticity indicator (for example, a checksum) that can be applied to the object?
- Can the change history and technological context of the object be traced sufficiently to ensure human readability and authenticity?
- Persistent identifier
- Has the object been assigned an identifier that ensures locally uniqueness?
- Is it important for the institution to have a universal or global persistent identifier for its objects? If so, which mechanism (for example, PURL, DOI)?
Intellectual property rights
- Is the rights holder information tracked and stored as part of the metadata?
- How are the rights of the rights holder protected from abuse (for example, limited public access, attribution statement)?
- Are the usage restrictions consistent with institution policy and mandate?
- Does the institution have sufficient rights for a preservation regimen?
- Will the costs of securing rights for long-term access be sustainable over the period of enduring value?
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