Step Two – Starting a Preservation Policy for Your Publishing Program

Now that you have completed Step One and better understand digital preservation in general and in your local environment, you can either start a preservation policy or work to incorporate the publishing program more fully into your library’s existing policy. Remember, you do not need to do this alone! Work with your colleagues.

If your institution has a policy:

  1. Read the policy.
  2. Talk to the policy holder or other relevant people you identified in step 1 to let them know of your interest in this. Speak about the incentives to stakeholders!
  3. Is the publishing program explicitly included in the institution’s preservation policy? Is there enough detail?
    • If the publishing program is included in a current policy with sufficient detail, great! You have a preservation policy! Make sure you understand it and work with the policy holder to ensure you’re following it.
    • If the publishing program is in a policy, but the policy is out of date, work with others to update the policy.
    • If the publishing program is included but not with much detail, you should:
      1. Work with the policy holder to outline how the policy should be applied to the publishing programming specifically.
      2. Identify how the policy is relevant to your institution’s scholarly research efforts
      3. Understand data management practices and effective scholarly communications
    • If the preservation policy does not mention the publishing program, you can either:
      1. Work with the policy holder to get it incorporated, or
      2. Start creating a preservation policy for your program (skip to below)

If your institution doesn’t have a policy:

  • If you have a digital preservation librarian, talk to them and share your desire for a preservation policy. This is a good opportunity to collaborate on the drafting of the new policy.
  • If you don’t have a digital preservation librarian, contact the other librarians in your institution responsible for curating digital resources, such as your institutional repository librarian, data librarians, university archivist, etc. Anyone working on the creation and curation of digital resources should be considered a stakeholder in digital preservation at your institution.

 

 

Starting a Digital Preservation Policy

The NASIG Model Digital Preservation Policy (created by members of NASIG and LPC) sample text and other examples provide a good framework to begin such a policy. This step walks through the first two sections, but all of the example policy text is worth considering and including in your policy.

Introduction

You may want to copy the NASIG Model Digital Preservation Policy Introduction section’s sample text and revise it to meet your local needs.

Some of the items you may want to customize:

  • Think about the way the publishing program is referenced to ensure it matches the breadth of your program (e.g., change scholarly publishing to include creative journals/books, open education resources, theses and dissertations, and podcasts as appropriate).
  • If your library publishing program does not have a mission statement, you may wish to consider creating one (it is referenced in the sample text).
  • Consider what you use beyond CLOCKSS, such as a private or global LOCKSS network, Portico, etc.
  • Remember, this is about digital preservation, not backups, so typically includes the final published content from your program but not any working files and agreements.
  • Assign roles and responsibilities for the digital preservation activities identified to staff members at the organization.

Principles

Next, move on to the Principles in the NASIG document and add this to your draft.

Some of the items you may want to customize:

  • Library publishing ought to be part of this phrase “preservation of its collections” ; hopefully, this is a common understanding at your institution.
  • You may want to ensure the library publishing program is explicitly included as an internal stakeholder.

Next Step

By the end of this step, you will either:

  • ensure your publishing program follows your institution’s preservation policy,
  • advocate for including your publishing program in the library’s preservation policy, or
  • initiate a preservation policy for your library or publishing program.

Continue on to Step Three: Scope

 

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