Digital Preservation Policy

Scope

Not every digital object in our collections needs to be selected for digital preservation. Not every digital object that we deem in need of preservation needs to be preserved by us. These last two cases lead inevitably to the need for collaboration and interoperability. Beyond DCDS, trusted creators, institutions, and vendors play a role in the stewardship of our digital resources, and we often rely on these collaborative efforts to effectively meet our digital preservation goals.

We aim to be transparent about our commitment to and capacity for preserving digital objects, our choice of which digital objects to preserve, how we preserve them, and the circumstances under which we allow access to the digital objects themselves. This aim will guide our choice of standards, formats, metadata, and maintenance procedures, all of which are central to successful preservation work.

DCDS is the primary custodian for the following materials:

• Digital materials created by the UNI community that are deemed to have permanent historical value.
• Digital surrogates created (either internally or via outsourcing) by DCDS that are deemed to have permanent historical value.
• Unique digital materials that have been officially appraised as having permanent historical value in accordance with the DCDS Collection Management Plan, legally transferred to DCDS, and accessioned by DCDS.

Objectives

Digital preservation encompasses a series of activities, processes, and tools necessary to ensure continued access to authentic digital materials. The objectives in this policy define a framework to:

• Establish and communicate an institutional commitment for digital preservation to the UNI user community.
• Identify and select digital assets to be preserved, and clarify the tiers of preservation DCDS can provide for specific groups of digital materials.
• Maintain a minimum of bit-level preservation for all objects entering the preservation system.
• Clarify the roles and responsibilities for those engaged with ensuring the sustainability of the digital preservation system.
• Develop and maintain in-house expertise for the responsible stewardship of digital materials as a core function of DCDS.

Challenge

Digital preservation is a demanding activity. As long as there is technology, we will need to actively and continuously preserve its informational artifacts. This complex work includes several obstacles that need to be addressed. First, there are technological barriers to preservation, including proprietary file formats and software, outdated physical media, and ephemeral Web-based platforms used to store digital materials. Second, there are legal barriers to preservation work that can inhibit the ability to perform digital preservation iteratively and over time. Third, there are practical issues given the scale, complexity, and variety of born-digital collections. Fourth, there are social implications associated with ensuring the existence of materials reflecting a broad range of knowledge, scholarship, and cultural heritage. With these obstacles in mind, we recognize that failure is possible; we cannot promise that preservation will be forever. That said, we aim to increase the longevity of our distinctive collections to the greatest extent possible. We continuously evaluate our institutional approach, whether risk-tolerant or risk-averse, and adjust as necessary given the surrounding circumstances.

Definitions

• Accession: To take legal and digital custody of a group of materials and establish physical and intellectual control.
• Acquisition: A group of materials digitally and legally transferred to a repository.
• Bit-level preservation: The maintenance of a digital object’s original bitstream, as opposed to file format migration. It is the minimum standard for digital preservation and allows for future preservation actions.
• Born-digital: Information created in a digital format.
• Deposit: Materials transferred to a repository without the transfer of title or ownership.
• Digital preservation: The storage, maintenance, and access to digital resources over the long term. Because of the risk of media failure and the rapid pace of technological change, digital preservation is an ongoing process.
• Digital preservation system: A system, consisting of people and technologies, for ensuring the long-term usability of digital objects and materials, beyond the limits of media failure or technological change.
• Digital surrogate/digitized materials: Materials that were created in analog form, but were reformatted (such as by scanning) into digital form, usually for preservation or access.
• Emulation: The imitation of a computer system to allow programs and media designed for a particular system to operate in a different, usually newer, system. A method of overcoming technological obsolescence.
• Ingest: The process of accepting electronic content or metadata into an electronic repository or database.
• Migration: The transfer of digital resources from one hardware or software generation to the next, while preserving the essential characteristics of the data. A method of overcoming technological obsolescence.
• Open source: A software development methodology and licensing approach that makes computer source code freely available, open to modification, and redistributable.

Policy Statement

We commit to providing the resources—including staff, technology, expertise, time, and budget—to actively and iteratively preserve and maintain digital materials. We recognize that preservation requires constant and intentional work at every stage of the records lifecycle.

DCDS’s mandate for ensuring the preservation of deposited digital content stems from two primary areas of responsibility:

• Contractual and legal obligation: To the extent that deposited digital content requires persistent, contractually mandated and legally binding access, the Library is legally required to preserve that content.
• Organizational commitment: DCDS has an obligation to preserve and maintain access to the digital materials that are under its stewardship.

We recognize that our responsibility for stewarding digital resources is distributed throughout Rod Library and goes far beyond staff in traditional technology and preservation departments. This distributed responsibility includes collection development, teaching and learning, technical services, research services, user experience, television and media, scholarly communications, and many other departments and areas of expertise. Just as stewardship responsibilities are widely distributed across our Library, they are also distributed beyond our Library and require the expertise and collaboration of external partners and the use of external tools.

Procedure

The primary purpose of digital stewardship is to ensure that the cultural heritage and enduring value of historical materials are preserved and made accessible for the long term.

Selection & acquisition

DCDS’s digital collections are subject to the same overarching criteria for curation, selection, management, and preservation as other resources in its collections. Collection specialists, who provide expertise on the long-term value of content, in consultation with preservation and information technology experts, make these decisions. For each specific project, we aim to confirm that the budgetary, staffing, and technological resources required will continue to be available and are sufficient to complete and maintain it. Materials that might soon become unusable or inaccessible should be prioritized for digitization and digital preservation activities. Digital collections should have a plan for metadata creation, discovery, and access before acquisition.

Levels of commitment

Recognizing that digital preservation is an ongoing, resource-intensive endeavor, Rod Library has outlined levels of commitment to different categories of materials. See our Digital Preservation Tiers for more information.

• Born-digital materials - A rigorous effort will be made to ensure preservation in perpetuity of material selected for preservation, including UNI’s institutional records as well as unique materials acquired by DCDS. This effort may include preservation strategies such as migration, emulation, and geographically distributed and redundant bit-level replication. Digitized materials with no available analog versions will be treated with the same care as born-digital materials.
  • Legacy digital materials - Legacy digital materials are materials donated to Rod Library before the development of a digital preservation system. Many of these materials were not officially appraised, accessioned, or evaluated for long-term value. Some of these materials are stored on obsolete media, encoded in obsolete file systems or formats, or are otherwise inaccessible. When possible, DCDS will attempt to recover this data and evaluate it for inclusion into the digital preservation system. Rod Library makes no guarantee that recovery will be successful or that it will be able to provide the resources necessary to attempt recovery.
• Digitized materials (available analog version) - In most cases, the analog version of these materials will be considered the preservation format, and preservation activities for the digital materials will be limited to local and non-distributed bit-level replication. Whenever possible, digitized materials will be created using file formats conducive to long-term preservation activities. The cost of re-digitizing materials should be weighed against the cost of long-term preservation. In cases where the analog carriers of information are obsolete or at great risk of obsolescence, such as audiovisual materials, the digitized materials will be considered the preservation copy and treated with the same care as born-digital materials.
• Non-permanent records - DCDS will make no effort to preserve non-permanent records, including temporary or transactional files, working files, and other non-records in conformance with UNI’s Records Schedule.
• Commercially available digital resources - Due to copyright and other licensing issues, DCDS will make no effort to preserve commercially available digital resources, including externally published content and proprietary software.

Maintaining a fundamental understanding of digital information and staying current with technological change is essential to monitor, design, and coordinate the systems and tools required for digital preservation. To that end, DCDS is committed to sufficient funding for operations and vital improvements for digital asset management, as well as ensuring digital preservation services are well-documented, auditable, and understandable.

DCDS will not limit digital objects accepted for preservation solely based on technological challenges. However, some digital objects may be prohibitively challenging, and the Library cannot be expected to commit to preserving these objects without first analyzing our capacity based on a clear understanding of the budgetary, staffing, and technological resources required.

In rare cases, a collection may contain material for which the Library is unable or unwilling to accept preservation responsibility. Although incidental preservation activities may take place upon this material, DCDS accepts no responsibility for its long-term accessibility or validity. Examples of materials at this level include objects known to be corrupt or not authorized for preservation at any level but which, for some reason, cannot be deleted immediately. Reappraisal and deaccessioning may be considered if one or more conditions are met.

Our digital preservation work is informed by guidelines created within the field of digital preservation and in alignment with established professional standards and best practices. For example, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Digital Preservation Handbook and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Levels of Digital Preservation provide guidance on building and evaluating our approach; open source tools maintained by the Open Preservation Foundation are integrated into our workflows; and file format standards for preservation master copies of digitized content are created in accordance with the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative.

Digital preservation strategies are based on the preservation of the intellectual content of the digital objects contained in the digital repository. Priority is given to maintaining the information contained in an individual content object, with the look and feel of any given object being preserved to the extent possible and deemed necessary. To this end, the Library utilizes the following approaches to preservation.

• Bit-level preservation: Includes maintaining multiple copies, virus checking, fixity checking, documentation of file formats, and periodic refreshment by copying files to new storage media.
• Bitstream copying: The digital preservation system maintains regularly scheduled backups of all information contained in the Library's digital repository, for use in the event of data loss. In combination with fixity checks, which identify potentially damaged content, this process ensures the integrity of content in the Library's digital repository and provides a foundation for its disaster recovery plans.
• Fixity checking: Digital materials are subject to biannual fixity checks, as well as before and after any time materials are transferred. Fixity checks compare the checksum values calculated at a given point in time with those generated at the material’s time of ingest. This activity mitigates the risk of objects becoming corrupt as it enables the repository managers to identify damaged or corrupted content and to revert to a valid version of the object from a previous point in time.
• Logical preservation: Items preserved at this level will receive bit-level preservation, as well as activities intended to ensure files remain usable. Activities may include disc imaging, normalizing or migrating files, or ensuring authentic rendering via emulation. Based on curatorial input and/or donor agreement, the Library will determine if it is more critical to preserve the intellectual content of the file, the original look and feel, or original usability, and will proceed to the best of its ability. This level of effort should be used rarely and only for assets of the highest importance.
• Archival file formats: Rod Library is committed to the use of file formats that support long-term sustainability. In general, the considerations for selecting file formats include ubiquity, the openness of the file format, its status as a preservation-friendly format, and how well the format is suited to format migration later on. See our Recommended File Formats for more information.
• Normalization: The Library will work to identify file formats well-suited to its approach to preservation and access. Upon ingest, materials not conforming to accepted standards may be systematically converted to a preselected format. To the extent possible, the Library will attempt to preserve the essential characteristics of the object. In cases requiring compromise, transformations that maintain the content of the object will be prioritized over those that preserve the presentation (in consultation with the curator and/or donor or donor agreement).
• Format migration: If the Library determines that a portion of its content is at risk of obsolescence, the content will be migrated to a stable format more suited to long-term preservation and use. This transformation may consist of migration to a newer version of the content’s existing format or transformation to a different format altogether. In all cases, preservation of the object’s intellectual content will be prioritized over the preservation of a specific presentation style.
• Metadata: DCDS will create metadata (i.e., administrative, descriptive, preservation, and technical) necessary for the maintenance and use of digital assets.

Governance, Roles, and Responsibilities

Digital preservation is a highly collaborative endeavor that requires collaboration across and beyond Rod Library.

Library Leadership

The Library’s Executive Management Team (EMT) evaluates high-level policies and programmatic plans; it provides oversight of development, implementation, and maintenance of the records lifecycle. The Dean’s Advisory Council (DAG) provides input and reviews policies and programmatic plans.

Digital Preservation Working Group

The Digital Preservation Working Group (DPWG) develops and implements digital preservation policy, procedures, and asset maintenance.

Curators

The Heads of Special Collections & University Archives, Digital Scholarship, and the University Museum are responsible for identifying relevant historical materials and communicating with potential and current donors and depositors, including negotiating the appropriate ownership and rights to be transferred with the materials.

Distinctive Collections & Digital Strategies

DCDS staff are responsible for the arrangement & description of digital collections, including forensically imaging materials for processing, identifying restricted digital materials, and determining copyright.

DCDS staff manage the digital preservation system day-to-day, including ingest, storage, and access functions.

DCDS staff are responsible for working with the UNI researcher community to increase awareness of digital materials that are available for research. 

IT Services

UNI IT Services is responsible for the maintenance and security of the servers, networks, and storage systems employed by the digital preservation system. The IT Services team works closely with DCDS to ensure systems run smoothly and are optimized for efficiency.

Donors/Depositors

Donors, or depositors, are the creators of materials for inclusion in our distinctive collections and play a critical role in the preservation of digital materials. They are responsible for the effective management of materials before transfer to Rod Library, including identifying historical materials, providing appropriate levels of description, and working closely with DCDS to ensure a successful transfer.

Researchers

Preservation strategies affect access capabilities. It is incumbent upon UNI researchers to communicate how different modes of access affect their research so that Rod Library can provide appropriate access mechanisms as requested.

External partners

DCDS may occasionally contract with external partners to provide additional support for digital preservation activities, including but not limited to digitization, augmenting hardware or software capacity, and providing development expertise or technical support for existing systems. The roles and responsibilities of these partners are contractually defined and may vary substantially over time.

Related Policies and Procedures

Library Related Policies and Procedures        

• Digital Preservation Tiers
• DCDS Collection Management Plan
• Recommended File Formats

University Related Policies and Procedures

• Records Retention
  • Records Retention Schedule

External Related Policies and Procedures

• National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA). Levels of Digital Preservation (March 2026). https://www.ndsa.org/publications/levels-of-digital-preservation/
• Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) (2025). https://www.iso.org/standard/87471.html 

Approval and Revision History

• Date Issued: 09/02/2026
• Date Last Updated/Reviewed: 09/02/2026
   
• Approved By: Dean’s Advisory Group
• Responsible Party: Distinctive Collections & Digital Strategies

Revision History

• Revised: