Why do an inventory as the first step in a digital preservation workflow?
- Inventorying is exploration. It’s an illumination into your current practices and your past endeavors.
- Inventorying is needed to answer the question: What’s under the publishing house’s umbrella? An inventory is a snapshot in time.
- Inventorying is needed to understand: What do you have? When you consider your portfolio at this high level, what similarities and differences do you immediately start to consider?
- Remember that everything inventoried will not be preserved nor treated in the same way. This is a necessary step needed to determine what materials rise to the level of requiring preservation.
What kinds of documents are included in an inventory?
- Formally published materials such as:
- Journals (and journal articles), monographs, textbooks, Digital Humanities (DH) projects, bibliographies
- Supplemental materials such as:
- Datasets
- Audiovisual materials & their transcripts
- Internal supporting documents such as:
- MOUs/MOAs with partners
- Licensing agreements between publishers (or publications) and creators. This includes both affiliated partners and external creators when content (such as images) is reused by our publications.
- Production files (i.e., drafts, InDesign files, etc.)
- Rejected manuscripts
- Peer reviews and communication from editors to authors
What kind of information do we want to capture in an inventory?
- Depending on whether the documents are formally published, supplemental, or internal, different information will be needed.
- Are there permissions associated with documents? For example, are they available only internally? Only to campus affiliates or on-campus users? Open access?
- Why do you keep these materials currently? (As in, needed for public access, potential legal dispute resolution, disaster recovery need, ease of cross-walking a publication to a new platform, going to university archives, etc.)
- Are the materials digital or physical? Are they born-digital or digitized?
- Where are the documents (and any copies) located? Consider that there may be multiple copies in different locations.
- Different considerations are needed for physical versus digital items
- Who maintains the documents and their storage? (i.e., someone’s local machine, library infrastructure, externally managed storage, or something else entirely?)
- What digital platforms are being used to enable the production or distribution of the content? (e.g., OJS, Janeway, bepress, YouTube, Vimeo)
- What formats are the documents in? (e.g., PDF, HTML, EPUB/XML)
- How are the works licensed?
- Are there identifiers associated with these works, such as ISSNs or ISBNs?
Inventory Template
- We have a spreadsheet to help you begin the process.
- You may want to think about your publications at broad levels, such as by platform or format, or you may wish to think of them title by title. There is no one way to do this; it is a tool for you to think about what you have, and you should adjust it in ways that make sense for your publishing program. Rearrange the rows as needed and make as many copies as you need to structure the inventory in a way that makes sense to you.
- You may also want to identify things you explicitly do not want to retain.
Next Step
By the end of this step, you will understand the variety of files related to your whole library publishing program to scope your preservation efforts
Continue on to Step One: Understanding the Preservation Landscape
Created by the 2024–25 Library Publishing Coalition Preservation Working Group members: Patricia Feeney, Esther Jackson, Ally Laird, Wendy Robertson, Sonya Sharififard, and Elizabeth Schwartz