This quick guide will help you understand what digital preservation is and how it is practiced at your institution. It is part of a series of short guides, created by LPC’s Digital Preservation Working Group, intended to support the community of library publishers in preservation activities.
Also available as a PDF.
Now that you’ve completed Step Zero and inventoried your content, let’s take a closer look at the digital preservation landscape.
What do we mean by Digital Preservation?
“Digital Preservation refers to the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary … (digital preservation) refers to all of the actions required to maintain access to digital materials beyond the limits of media failure or technological and organizational change.” (DPC “What Is Digital Preservation”)
- This is an active process, not a one-and-done process, because content changes
- Digitally preserved content is an actively curated collection that is not meant for short-term access
- It explicitly accounts for the preservation of published materials agnostic of – and potentially outlasting – any specific publishing organization or platform.
- For more information, see:
Why do we do Digital Preservation for our publications?
- What we publish is worth preserving for the long term. Your scholarly publications are part of the scholarly record and need to be available for future generations.
- Your publications are your authors’ legacy, and they’ll want to be confident that their works are part of the long-term scholarly record.
- Your publications are valuable to you as a publisher and to your organization, and the preservation of this content safeguards the time and money you’ve invested in the content.
- Libraries have traditionally preserved scholarship, which has shifted somewhat to publishers with born digital content; library publishers tick both boxes, so they definitely should ensure their content is preserved for the long term.
Institutional Context
Understand how digital preservation is practiced at your institution to figure out how preserving your publications fits within existing policies and practices.
- Who is doing related work? Does your institution have a digital preservation librarian? Is there a group that works with digital preservation? Does your Archivist want any of these materials for the Archives?
- Does your institution have a digital preservation policy? What is its scope?
- Does your institution have a records management policy or retention schedule? How often is this updated?
- Questions to ask your Digital Preservation Librarian/Acquisitions Librarian/IT Staff/IR Librarian/University Archivist about tools and platforms for digital preservation that are available to your publishing program:
- Do you subscribe to a preservation system (e.g., Portio, CLOCKSS)
- Do your platforms have preservation capabilities?
- Do you work with a platform vendor that may facilitate preservation services? You may wish to contact them if you are unsure.
- How are standard backups and storage handled? How much space do you have?
- What tools are in use locally? For example:
- Web Crawling:
- Preservation System
- You may also want to look at https://coptr.digipres.org/index.php/Main_Page for a more exhaustive list of tools
Next Step
Continue on to Step Two: Starting a Preservation Policy for Your Publishing Program, or go back to the full list of guides.
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
You are free to use, distribute, adapt, and build upon this work, as long as you give appropriate credit to LPC.