Digital Preservation
Digital preservation encompasses all of the activities required to ensure that the digital content designated for long-term preservation is maintained in usable formats, for as long as access to that content is needed or desired, and can be made available in meaningful ways to current and future users... (See digital preservation and related definitions in the Glossary)
Community Standards and Practice
Since the release of the Preserving
Digital Information
report in 1996, the digital preservation
community has been formulating and promulgating standards and practice, such as:
Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities, 2002
(PDF)Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC): Criteria and Checklist
(PDF)
ICPSR's Approach to Digital Preservation
The primary objective of the digital preservation function is to ensure long-term access to the more than 500,000 files in the ICPSR collections. ICPSR is a data archive with a nearly 50-year track record for preserving and making data available over several generational shifts in technology. The digital preservation program actively supports ICPSR's mission statement:
ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for a diverse and expanding social science research community.
Building on its singular track record for preserving data over time, ICPSR has made it a priority to demonstrate compliance with prevailing standards and practice of the digital preservation community. ICPSR examples include documented progress towards a comprehensive set of policies and procedures and development of appropriate preservation strategies and digital content lifecycle reports (PDF) for new types of social science research content, e.g., Web sites, audio, video, and geospatial information systems.
If you wish to submit a question/request electronically, please email the Digital Preservation unit at digitalpreservation@icpsr.umich.edu.
