Digital Preservation Policy

Introduction

This policy describes the digital preservation principles and approaches to preserving, securing and sharing digital data of enduring value.

The policy covers the following activities:

• Digital Records Capture
• Storage Management
• Digital Preservation Activities
• Preservation Metadata
• Record Delivery

The policy should be read in conjunction with the Digital Repository Policy and the Preservation Digitisation Standards.

Policy

Digital Records Capture

Data will be captured in accordance with specified standards, guidelines and procedures to ensure complete and authentic capture, with prescribed datasets and metadata.

Storage Management

The digital preservation infrastructure will ensure data integrity, format sustainability and information security, by specifying data storage solutions, redundancy and back-up, data integrity and archive systems and services.

Digital Preservation Activities

Data repositories will aim to maintain and verify the digital record in its original format (bit preservation) to ensure continuing integrity. At-risk data formats will be converted to a prescribed preservation format to ensure continued accessibility with current technology (normalisation).

Preservation Metadata

Preservation processes that result in any physical or logical change to a digital object will be logged and recorded in the associated metadata, to provide an audit trail. All changes to metadata will themselves be audited. The relationship between any digital object and its metadata will be maintained persistently. A persistent, unique identifier will be assigned to every digital object at the point of ingestion, and this identifier will be used to provide a persistent link.

Record Delivery

Records will be delivered to users in ways that do not limit the use and re-use of the records' content.