This quick guide will help you combine what you now know about digital preservation and to look back at your inventory to see what should be included in your digital preservation plan. 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 started your preservation policy in Step Two you can move on to the Scope in the NASIG document and add this to your draft
What things in your inventory are you actually going to preserve?
Look at the inventory you did in step zero and the introduction and principles you created in step two and decide how you want to scope your policy. In-scope items are things you as a library publisher are responsible for preserving; out-of-scope materials are preserved/retained through other means, or things that should not be retained at all.
For each item in your inventory, create an additional column, Preservation Decision, and input one of the following values for each object: Preserve, Back up, Do not retain. Considering if the material is meant for the public or is an internal file can help you make these decisions.
What to preserve:
The Model Digital Preservation Policy defines in scope publications as the “version of record” of a digital publication and what its constituent parts are, including related metadata and supplementary materials.”
In-scope materials should include:
- Published content: journal content (research articles, reviews, etc.), non-journal textual content (ebooks, dissertations, OER, etc.), non-textual publications (i.e., podcasts, videos, digital exhibits, etc.).
- Materials that a user community will access directly, in multiple output formats (i.e., HTML, PDF, EPUB, etc.)
- Errata
- Front matter (e.g., editorial information, policies)
- Supplementary content that you host meant for the public (data, videos, worksheets, etc.), including material omitted from print versions (e.g., additional tables or figures)
- Datasets (including datasets underpinning a digital humanities project)
- Metadata
- Descriptive
- Administrative, including Intellectual Property Rights
- Technical
- Relationships among the parts
Consider if in scope:
Consider if it is appropriate to preserve the following items or if backing them up / not retaining them is sufficient:
- Previous versions that appeared on your platform (e.g., accepted manuscript, before a modification)
- Retracted articles
- A version of a publication prior to a name-change of an author
- Advertisements included in the published version
- External links
- Annotations or comments on the public site
- Open peer review notes and author responses
- Externally hosted supplementary content (e.g., datasets) — you may want to ensure where it is hosted is properly preserved
- Related blog/social media posts or other promotional material
Material to back up may include:
Not every file you generate as part of your publishing program needs to be preserved to the same degree. However, you may want to back up files if they should remain accessible to an audience of internal stakeholders (i.e., you the publisher, your library, the journal editors) to aid in platform migrations, accessibility enhancements, potential legal issues (don’t get sued), and institutional memory.
- Working files, e.g., InDesign, LaTex — note that these files can be used to create a more accessible version of content.
- Separate files for embedded assets (images, videos, etc.) — you may want the full size retained in an open-source format so as bandwidth improves you can include a better quality item.
- Email communications (business of publications)
- MOUs/MOAs with authors and/or editors.
- Copyright permissions.
- See also the “Example materials” in the “For stakeholder access” section of the NASIGuide.
You should also consider how much the look and feel of a site is important, and if all features of a site need to be preserved. This is particularly important for experimental publications and digital humanities projects.
Material not to retain may include:
You do not need to keep every file generated as part of your publishing program, nor should you. Examples of things you may be able to delete include:
- Versions of articles going through the editing and layout process
- Batch ingest files
Next Step
Celebrate! You have made significant progress in preserving works for our future!
Additional Preservation Resources are in the works. Be sure to check back for more.
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.