Digital Preservation Policies
The Instituto Internacional de Investigación y Desarrollo Tecnológico Educativo INDTEC, C.A., sponsor of the Revista Scientific, through digital preservation methods, ensures the intellectual content of electronic records, for long periods of time, maintaining its attributes as integrity, authenticity, inalterability, originality, reliability and accessibility.
Differences between preservation and backup copies
It should be understood that digital preservation is different from security copies. It is not the same what is to be preserved as what is to be saved as a backup.
Backup copies are a protection against catastrophic events (breakage of a disk or loss of data due to blackouts, for example). What is saved as a backup in a digital library are, basically, two things: on the one hand, the information published on the server (digital resources plus catalog information) and, on the other hand, digital resources in the process of editing.
Digital preservation, however, is not about supporting neither the server data nor the daily work material, but about safeguarding the high quality digital resources that we will need in the future, creating a public access library with automatically generated formats.
Backup copies can follow several known methods: integral copy, incremental copy or rotating copies, for example, and the periodicity is usually high (daily or weekly).
In the case of preservation copies, on the contrary, the method is usually the integral recording of the material once and the copying of the material once a year or every year and a half in another new medium (rejuvenation).
*In both cases, data integrity control mechanisms are used when making copies, using redundancy algorithms that verify that the data is kept as recorded.
Definition of preservation policies
Digital preservation should be established as an institutional responsibility and a commitment of all personnel. The Instituto Internacional de Investigación y Desarrollo Tecnológico Educativo INDTEC,C.A., meets the following questions: What to save and why save it ?; Where to store it ?; How long to save it ?; How to find it later? How to make it remain unchanged ?; and How to prevent it from becoming obsolete?
“Digital collections with lasting value must be created”
Some of the possible causes of the defects in the digital information or loss of data are: errors of management and negligence, technical and mechanical failures, operator errors, viruses, unauthorized and undocumented changes, obsolescence or incompatibility of the software, loss of programs, incomplete metadata, aging information.
Preservation procedures
The INDTEC, in compliance with the preservation policies is governed by the following procedures implemented:
- The storage of digital resources with extreme care.
- Evaluations in the use of preservation strategies such as data rejuvenation, data consistency checks, migration, emulation, preservation of technology and digital archeology.
- The encapsulation of the information to be preserved together with descriptive metadata.
- The documentation, understanding and coding the information preserved without reference to external documentation.
- The sufficiency, minimizing dependencies of systems, data or documentation.
- And the documentation of the type of content, with a view to a future user to find or implement software that allows to see the information preserved.
In Yes, the INDTEC, has included a policy that is based on storing information in formats that are widely used today. (This increases the probability that when a format becomes obsolete there are still programs for conversion: XML, HTML and PDF are examples of these).
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*It does not make sense to have something stored if we can not find it, or if we do not even know we have it. The goal is not only to preserve digital information, but to have an efficient search and recovery system.
