Session 2

What is a Digital Preservation Policy?Walkthrough the Policy TemplatePreservation Preparedness ActivitiesPolicy Building Case Study - ISU

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Digital preservation policies document an organizations commitment to preserve digital content for future use; specify file formats to be preserved and the level of preservation to be provided; and ensure compliance with standards and best practices for responsible stewardship of digital information.

From Long Definition of Digital Preservation, prepared by the ALCTS Preservation and Reformatting Section, Working Group on Defining Digital Preservation, accessed at http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/resources/preserv/defdigpres0408.cfm.*

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Addressing issues of Scope and Selection Criteria can help to clarify policies on:StrategiesEconomics & SustainabilityOperating PrinciplesChallengesRoles & ResponsibilitiesOutreach & EducationMetadataPermissions & AccessDistributed Responsibilities*

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Who are the key departments and individuals you might need to coordinate with to identify assets and discover preservation needs for each of the primary resource groups that might exist across your institution?

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Establishing selection criteria is a good opportunity to begin thinking about available resources and sustainable strategies and how these relate to priorities*

Defining digital assets at your institutionDigitized (e.g., scanned newspapers)Born-digital (e.g., websites)Electronic records (e.g., spreadsheets, databases, emails)Digital Research Data (e.g., raw sensor data)

Where do your digital assets reside?At the departmental & unit level? Outside your institution?

Who are the major producers and consumers?Researchers? Scholars? External parties?

Can they be deposited for preservation?To what extent?

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Perform a technical assessment of your Librarys existing approaches and capacity for creating, and maintaining digital assets. Factor in organizational structure, staffing and skill sets.Address issues of quality control through preservation planning & risk assessment

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NEDCC - Readiness AssessmentCRL Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC)Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA)Data Seal of Approval (DSA)Planet Preservation Planning Tool (Plato)OAIS*

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Communicate position toward trustworthy preservation by identifying steps taken to ensure use of standards OAISDigital Preservation Readiness AssessmentTrustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC)DRAMBORAData Seal of Approval *

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Preservation responsibility will undoubtedly be a joint endeavor (particularly between your Library, campus IT, and other external parties) and policy should reflect solidified agreements between all parties charged with responsibility.

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Metadata is increasingly becoming central to trustworthy preservation, and policy statements should articulate your Librarys position on capturing some level of preservation metadata, and the role it will play in managing that metadata.

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Establishing the options for access and use of your institutions digital assets will go a long way toward both defining what sorts of management and dissemination workflows might need to be developed, as well as how to communicate the terms of such access and use.

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Navigating the rights issues can go a long way toward articulating the terms under which partnerships can be pursued to further preservation development.

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Financial Sustainability:Sustainable Management & Financial Plans Multi-Year BudgetFactoring in financial cyclesReview Schedules (annual)Seek diverse revenue streams to support preservation activities

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Remember Trends in Digital PreservationPerform Risk AssessmentCommitting to analyze and report on risk, benefit, investment and expendituresIdentifying the real and potential threats to the digital preservation program, the digital collections, producers and consumersShould include an inventory of file formats, technology infrastructure, legal mandates, staffing, etc.

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Champion your policiesShare your development Develop workshopsJoin coalitions and working groupsKnow your sphere of influenceBe open to learning and evolving!*

Policy StatementSummary Statement*

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Review your institutions broader mission statementsConsider other legal, ethical, and policy mandatesArticulate the needs and the opportunities related to your institutions resource groups*

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Why does your institution preserve content (e.g., institutional, legal, consortial obligations)?

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Time for one or two quick questions

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OK, Lets dive into Session 2*So, in this session we want start first things first by asking the question: What is a Digital Preservation Policy?

And then what well do is walk through the Policy Template that Ive just given you

At each step of the policy template Ill just briefly highlight some preparedness and planning that you can begin to engage with at the level of each policy element. We have a couple of different resources to spotlight for your future reference the Digital Assets Survey and the Policy & Planning Resources. Well briefly cover those.

And then well get a really great case study from Cinda May on what policy-building looked like when she kicked off the process at Indiana State University*So without further ado, lets look at a one of the more authoritative definitions of digital preservation policies to help frame and context the type of work were going to be talking about. This is from ALA.

Fairly straight-forward, and it does a great job of setting the table for the work that youll undertake for your policy development.

Situating preservation at the level of your institutional mission, placing boundaries around what you will and wont preserve, and bringing your activities into line with those deemed trustworthy, among other things of course.*Now, when our MetaArchive Preservation Committee picked up this process of trying to develop a simple policy template we started with a broad environmental scan of existing and well-developed digital preservation policies and it just so happened that these five institutions became our exemplars. Yale, Columbia, the National Library of Australia, Cornell, and a little closer to your alls neck of the woods UIUC.

Now interestingly they had a fairly good set of overlap between their various elements. So as I work through each of the policy elements youll see some examples of what those elements look like from one of these institutions and their approved policy. And get a chance to see policy in action so to speak.*So, lets not waste anytime. Well dive right into the template. You can see the full range of core elements weve compiled listed here and on the sheet there in front of you. And as you can see, we want to start unpacking Scope and Selection because we think these two elements in particular can help to clarify your policies on everything that follows.*Now, dealing with Scope is all about summarizing the resource groups for which your institution is providing digital preservation services.

And when we use the term resource groups what we mean by that can be a couple of different things. These could be types of digital assets such as what you see listed here from Cornell. These could also be various departments, or units, or even external sources of digital data.

The idea is to arrive at and articulate some clear decisions around what your institution can reasonably commit to preserve and from whom you will accept deposits of data.*Taking it down to the level of planning and preparedness, a key activity is to determine whom you would need to coordinate with at your institution to identify assets and discover preservation needs for each of the primary resource groups that might exist across your institution.

Some key partners might be your Office of Sponsored Research or your Faculty Council?

These are the logical support units at your universities that can help you distribute assessment surveys (which well talk about more in just a moment).

*Related to Scope is Selection Criteria, which at the level of policy needs to outline the way that decisions are made regarding what will be preserved.

Again, from Cornell, what you can see here is that they have called out several significant properties that they factor in. Content needs to support teaching and scholarship, content needs to be functional, and it needs to be in keeping with the institutions broader collection management standards.

Youll notice that this strikes a fairly decent balance between some specific baseline requirements, not being exhaustive, but anchoring selection to the librarys existing mission.*Now, as you come to terms with what your selection criteria should be for the range of digital assets that you can reasonably provide preservation for, this begins to pull in questions about what your available resources are in terms of staff, funding, and technology.

It starts to become clear that your ambitions for providing preservation start to bump up against the degree to which your practical strategies can be sustained over the short and long term.

And in the end it will be a trade-off. *Now, because these issues of Scope and Selection Criteria can determine so many of the other policy elements that we discuss here, we wanted to put together a very simple and practical assessment tool that your library can use to flesh these areas out.

This is our Digital Assets Survey.

And the idea here is that you can use this set of survey questions or a variation therof to begin working with your universitys Office of Sponsored Research or its Faculty Council or some other higher-level administrative unit to begin soliciting and gathering information about the types of digital assets that may exist across your institution, where they exist, how they are currently managed, who uses them etc..

Once you have this information in hand you can start articulate some preliminary policy positions and start exploring your sustainable strategies.*Now, Strategies, aims to summarize the lifecycle management practices of your institution.

What you see here, for example, is that the National Library of Australia has linked its preservation strategies very heavily to its demands for access (formats that are able to be rendered), its enlisted metadata quite heavily in this strategy, as well as engaging in fairly robust preventative measures against file corruption. *Some practical exercises you can engage in to unearth what your strategies can or should be include:

Performing a technical assessment of your Librarys existing approaches and capacities, documenting your:

Library IT and campus IT relationships?Hardware & software policies and purchasingStorage & storage management environment(s)Existing back-up measures or archiving practicesInventory and file managementQuality measures and replacement cycles

Mapping your organizational structure/staffing:

Identifying necessary dutiesIdentify staff with adequate skills and expertiseReview staffing plans, position descriptions, develop a matrix of duties, skills and expertiseImplement professional development training

Engaging in some serious preservation planning & risk assessmentand on that note there are some really great tools that have been developed:

*All of which are listed on the Policy & Planning Resources page that you have there with you.

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Im very familiar with OAIS, TRAC, DRAMBORA and the NEDCC Readiness Assessment so folks are invited to pull me aside at the break if they want some suggestions on when and how to use these. But they are all very well documented in their own right.*Moving on to Operating Principles. This is a policy element that is intended to provide an overview of some of the guiding methodologies and philosophies undergirding your preservation activities.

You can see here from Cornell that they pay homage to OAIS, but also that they make a commitment to standards in general, and that they aim for a high degree of interoperability through open source technologies both of which you will recall from the previous session on trends.

The idea here is that you make it clear to the public and your stakeholders that your preservation activities havent been developed in the wild, but are consistent with the digital preservation communities standards and prevailing best practices.*The thing to do here at the level of planning is to spend some time getting oriented with many of the resources that were just mentioned, but particularly those assessment tools that deal with trusted practices and accountability.

As I mentioned earlier, the MetaArchive went through a rather lengthy process studying OAIS and TRAC and looking at areas where we aligned and misaligned, spent time refining our practices where it was clear that we needed to, and communicated the findings from our assessment.

Having gone through that process we have been able to link our policies to and procedures to these community-derived standards and communicate that back out to the public and our stakeholders.

Again, these resources do a wonderful job of explaining the ways in which they are intended to be used. There are also some wonderful publications in the Policy & Planning Resources document that describe the application of these assessment tools in various repository contexts.

*Roles & Responsibilities deals with who is involved and at what level. And who assumes responsibility.

UIUC here makes it clear that their preservation program is a joint endeavor between their University Library and their campus IT*This is likely to be the case with many of your institutions.

One of the things that you can do during your policy and planning phase is to very clearly map what roles various units, both internal and external, can and should play in your overall preservation program considering their investment and their area of expertise. This can help to situate responsibility in the correct areas and solidify your policy statements. This is a great stage of thought for firming up your strategies and knowing where they are best supported, given what you are trying to accomplish.

Central AdministrationEvaluators? Consultants?Institutional Departments & Units Producers? Evaluators? Curators? Consultants?Librarians & ArchivistsPreservation Services? Curators?Designated CommunityConsumers and Users?External PartnersProducers? Consumers? Preservation Services? Evaluators?VendorsPreservation Services? Consultants?

*Metadata is fairly straight-forward essentially describing your guiding policies for ascribing metadata for preservation.

This is Yales metadata policy. Youll see that they do a great job of acknowledging what sorts of metadata elements are essential to the preservation phase of the information lifecycle and why.

Youll also notice that they dont necessarily commit to any particular metadata standard in their policy, such as PREMIS. And that may be because, as youll recall from the previous session, preservation metadata standards are still a work in progress and only recently becoming implemented and explored. Conceptually they make all the sense in the world. Functionalizing that metadata is still being explored.*The most important thing is to internally begin wrestling with your approaches, committing to exploring and refining the role that metadata should play in your digital preservation, and arriving at some clear but flexible statements that articulate your Librarys position.

Yales policy is one good example of how you might be able to approach that.*Permissions and Access again fairly self-explanatory but perhaps never straight-forward from a rights perspective. It really depends on the content youre aiming to preserve.

Preservation and access are often pitched in the literature as fatefully intertwined with access often being a key driver for what gets preserved. But, speaking from the MetaArchive perspective there can be instances when its valuable for decoupling these to a certain degree and considering other factors that might determine what should be preserved. Institutional investments, risk factors, etc.

Youll see here that Cornell makes an intentional philosophical statement: Without the preservation of digital materials, access would not be possible and essential cultural heritage materials would be at risk

They have a great policy that deals with positions of access on a content-by-content basis. Something to consider.

In terms of the process that you will likely go through to arrive at various positions regarding access and permissions for the use of preserved materials. Youll likely need to consult with legal representatives for your institution, research copyright issues for various content.

The end goal should really be to limit your liability and develop a strategy for breach of copyright and removal of offending content

Some things to consider would be that:

Digital program contracts should address the need to be able to work with and potentially modify digital objects to keep them accessible.Agreements with depositors should specify and/or transfer rights to the program enabling appropriate and necessary preservation actions for the digital object.Third party organizations should guarantee that relevant contracts, licenses, etc express rights, responsibilities and expectations of each party.

*And just to link this process back into some of the other policy elements and phases of planning keep in mind that in addition to shoring up your policy statements on permissions and access, this process can go a long ways toward defining what sorts of management and dissemination workflows might need to be developed. So getting back to strategies.

*Distributed Responsibilities this section of your policies can document what your institutions relationship is to other institutions in the overall effort to carry out your digital preservation.

At the MetaArchive we were thrilled to see this as a common element across several of the exemplar policies that we looked at. It goes a long way toward underscoring the trend I mentioned in the first session on Roles & Responsibilities.

The example here is from Columbia University acknowledging that partnerships are crucial to the long term preservation of digital content. They do a great job of setting forth criteria that can help to govern any negotiations that arise between the sharing of effort and the exchange of content.

Again, the idea here is to introduce flexibility and address concerns.*Linking this back to the previous element on permissions and access. Keep in mind that navigating those rights issues will go a long way toward articulating the terms under which partnerships can be pursued to further preservation development, and what some of your criteria might need to be to negotiate such partnerships both immediately and into the future.

*Economics & Sustainability this policy piece addresses issues of cost and where appropriate who is responsible for those costs.

Youll see from Yales example here that they shift their statements toward communicating a solid grasp on the areas of digital preservation that incur expenditures. This is one way of communicating outward to stakeholders that your institution understands the needed investments and is concerning itself with making sure that these activities are supported.

The takeaway here is that policies should confidently communicate the types of preservation activities that are in need of on-going financial support and general strategies that the Library will pursue to ensure that they are supported.

*Ultimately, policy statements should be under-girded by responsible financial planning, accounting, and management.

So making sure that you are creating and maintaining management and financial plans dedicated to your preservation activities and linked into youre your librarys broader plans.

Maintaining multi-year budgets and not failing to factor in financial cycles

Putting in place annual review cycles

And, getting back once again to our session on trends making sure to seek diverse revenue streams to support your preservation activities to ensure that the floor does not suddenly drop out from underneath your program.*Challenges is all about being honest and straight-forward with some of the barriers and hurdles to your digital preservation program.

You will see here that UIUC has called out the frustrating pace of technological change, sustainability issues, maintaining constructive collaborative relationships with their preservation partner, and monitoring for format obsolescence.*When trying to assess what the various challenges to your program might be think back on some of the trends that were mentioned in Session 1.

And more practically, consider engaging in risk assessment around things like investments and expenditures, take a look not only at your overall program, but the collections themselves, as well as the communities on both sides of your repository the producers and consumers, and make an effort to inventory your content, your technologies, and your staffing to see where gaps may exist.

DRAMBORA is one tool that can help at this stage for engaging risk assessment.

*Outreach & Education was this great policy element that we encountered in the various policies that we looked at. We think it is so important because it can communicate an incredible amount towards the policy approval and implementation phase. This can communicate to your upper administration that you are aiming to be proactive with both your program and your policies. Most institutions upper administrations are interested in investing in programs and initiatives that are seeking to promote the mission of the institution beyond the institution itself. Building reputation, influence and leadership.

You can see here that the NLA takes very seriously its contribution to the broader digital preservation community, and to its community of stakeholders. It also does a great job at the level of this policy statement identifying its sphere of influence, as you see here towards the bottom.*So:

Champion your policiesShare your development Develop workshopsJoin coalitions and working groupsKnow your sphere of influenceBe open to learning and evolving!

*Now that weve done the grand tour of the core policy areas that will need attention, weve identified some planning & assessment activities that you can engage in to develop and articulate your policies, the last step is to circle back around and make some broad statements about your overall policy itself.*Every good policy needs a Policy Statement

And the idea here is to underscore the purpose of your policy through a very simple statement.

You can see here how the National Library of Australia has articulated this.*As you articulate the purpose of your digital preservation policy, be sure to

Review your institutions broader mission statementsConsider other legal, ethical, and policy mandatesArticulate the needs and the opportunities related to your institutions resource groups

*And then a Summary Statement that summarizes the major guiding principles that are driving and reinforcing your digital preservation program and its policies.

The idea here is that when all is said and done, it should be fairly easy to make the case outwardly to the importance of your digital preservation and how it will be managed and sustained going forward.*Very simply answer the question:

Why does your institution preserve content?

*Date & Authors. This is simple and straight-forward, but surprisingly gets left off of policies more often than you might think:

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Who wrote this policy?

How often is this policy re-evaluated and by whom?

*Related Documents is all about linking to other institutional documentation that has a meaningful relationship to your digital preservation program or policy things like Disaster Plans, Records Management Policy, Collections Development Policy, Digitization Policies, Campus IT Policies, etc.

The operative term here is linking get your policies online for the world to see connect them to your broader institutional policies where relevant.*And then finally, make it clear to your policys audience precisely what you mean when you are using terms specific to your digital preservation activities.*