ICPSR Digital Preservation Policy Framework

Version 5 -- November 29, 2023
Updated by the ICPSR Data Stewardship Policy Committee

ICPSR advances and expands social and behavioral research, acting as a global leader in data stewardship and providing rich data resources and responsive educational opportunities for present and future generations. This Digital Preservation Policy Framework supports that mission and is the highest level digital preservation policy document at ICPSR. It makes explicit ICPSR's commitment to preserving the digital assets in its collections through the development and evolution of a comprehensive digital preservation program. This policy framework aligns with the goals defined in the ICPSR Strategic Plan and contains references to other relevant ICPSR policies and procedures. The audience for the framework includes ICPSR members, staff, data depositors, funders, and the general user community.

This framework is informed by Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities, and is organized around the seven attributes of a trusted digital repository:

  • OAIS compliance
  • Administrative responsibility
  • Organizational viability
  • Financial sustainability
  • Technological and procedural suitability
  • Systems security
  • Procedural accountability.

2. OAIS Compliance

In achieving its digital preservation objectives, ICPSR recognizes the need to comply with the prevailing standards and practice of the digital preservation community. ICPSR is committed to developing its digital preservation policies, repository, and strategies in accordance with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model (2012) (formalized as ISO 14721). ICPSR tracks and responds to related OAIS initiatives, including developments in digital archives certification, persistent identifiers, preservation metadata, and the producer-archive interface. The mapping of ICPSR's preservation process to OAIS is synthesized in Digital Preservation Requirements Applied to ICPSR.

3. Administrative Responsibility

As documented in its Constitution, ICPSR was established in 1962 as a data archive within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Since then, ICPSR has had a fundamental commitment to and successful track record for acquiring and ensuring long-term access to core digital assets of social science.

3.1 Mandate

The mandate for digital preservation at ICPSR is multi-faceted:

  • Scholarly commitment: The digital preservation program at ICPSR enables scholarship by ensuring continued access to social science research results. ICPSR also supports the scientific mission of the Institute for Social Research (ISR) and the broader scholarly mission of the University of Michigan.
  • Membership services: ICPSR preserves social science digital assets and provides its members with ongoing access to its digital collections.
  • Contractual obligations and grants: ICPSR has contracted with data producers and received grant funding to ensure that social science research data are preserved and accessible.

3.2 Objectives

The digital preservation function at ICPSR is organized to address these objectives:
  • Maintain a comprehensive and responsive digital preservation program that identifies, acquires, verifies, archives, and disseminates core social science digital assets
  • Adapt preservation strategies to incorporate the capabilities afforded by new and emerging technologies in cost-effective and responsible ways
  • Serve the needs of membership organizations by enabling uninterrupted access to digital content over time as the technology for digital content creation and dissemination evolves
  • Meet the archival requirements of funding agencies and contracting entities committing to the long-term preservation of designated digital content
  • Demonstrate auditable compliance with and contribute to the development of the standards and practice of the digital preservation community
  • Foster collaborative partnerships with social science researchers and other digital archives to make the best use of available resources and avoid duplicative efforts

4. Organizational Viability

The digital preservation function is integrated into the operations and planning of ICPSR and throughout the management stages of the digital content lifecycle.

4.1 Scope

ICPSR accepts responsibility for preserving and making available digital content, associated documentation, and other metadata provided by depositors in accordance with the ICPSR Collection Development Policy.

4.2 Operating Principles

In fulfilling its digital preservation function, ICPSR makes an explicit institutional commitment to the following set of principles:

  • Comply with OAIS and other digital preservation standards and practice.
  • Ensure that digital content at ICPSR can be provided to users and exchanged with other digital repositories so that it remains readable, meaningful, and understandable.
  • Participate in the development and promulgation of digital preservation community standards, practice, and research-based solutions.
  • Develop a scalable, reliable, sustainable, and auditable digital preservation repository.
  • Manage hardware, software, and storage media in accordance with professional standards, quality control specifications, and security requirements.

4.3 Roles and Responsibilities

As an organization acting for its member institutions, funding bodies, and depositors, ICPSR has accepted responsibility for preserving its digital assets. Within ICPSR, the Director, the Associate Director, the Metadata and Preservation unit, the Computing and Network Services unit, the Data Curation unit, and the project directors and project managers all contribute to the digital preservation function and the lifecycle of digital content at ICPSR. The ICPSR Council, an elected advisory board, evaluates high-level policy documents and reviews programmatic plans and progress. The roles and responsibilities within ICPSR for long-term management have been explicitly defined and can be found at Digital Preservation Policies and Planning at ICPSR.

4.4 Selection and Acquisition

The ICPSR Collection Development Policy sets forth the priorities and criteria for acquiring digital content. The ICPSR deposit process reflects the priorities and criteria that are defined in the policy. The Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving provides guidance and templates for depositors to encourage complete and well-documented deposits.

4.5 Access and Use

ICPSR's "designated community" (a term defined by the OAIS Reference Model) includes social science researchers, graduate students, undergraduates, policymakers, practitioners, and journalists.

ICPSR provides a range of access services and the ICPSR Data Access Policy defines the principles and criteria for access to data in its collections. To protect the identity of human subjects who may be represented in the deposited data, ICPSR devotes significant resources to developing and implementing the means to ensure confidentiality. ICPSR has developed lower-level policies and procedures to manage access to digital content, including Procedures for Processing Requests for Restricted Data, the Privacy Policy for handling information about users, Release Management Procedures that specify the preparation of digital content for release, and the Requests for Permission to Redistribute ICPSR Data policy that addresses the use of ICPSR digital content by other data archives and distributors.

4.6 Challenges

ICPSR faces several digital preservation challenges.

  • Technological change: ICPSR, like any organization engaged in digital preservation, needs to be responsive to continually changing technology. As information technology evolves, new content types, capabilities, and preservation challenges emerge. At the same time, ongoing threats to the authenticity, integrity, and availability of existing data collections must be identified and remediated.
  • New digital content: To document social science research effectively, ICPSR is expanding the types of digital content collected to include research project Web sites, audio and video files, social media data, and geospatial information systems. Existing policies, procedures, and practices need to be revised or re-engineered to encompass new digital content.
  • Training and awareness: All of the ICPSR staff contribute directly and indirectly to the digital preservation function, though the majority of staff members do not have digital preservation as an explicit or significant portion of their responsibilities. ICPSR is committed to providing appropriate training for and raising awareness about digital preservation issues and developments both for its internal staff and for the broader community of data producers, data archivists, and data users.

5 Financial Sustainability

ICPSR has identified specific resources to support and enhance its digital preservation function.

5.1 Institutional Commitment

To sustain its digital preservation function, ICPSR has allocated a portion of its membership support to digital preservation services. In addition, ICPSR continually seeks external research funding to extend its digital preservation scope and capabilities and has secured contracts to fund specific initiatives. Information about institutional commitment and financial sustainability are available in the ICPSR Annual Report and in the annual budget of ICPSR.

5.2 Cooperation and Collaboration

The active and collaborative research program at ICPSR integrates digital preservation requirements and competencies into its priorities and acknowledges digital preservation as a shared community responsibility. ICPSR has long-standing and emerging partnerships around digital preservation with other data repositories, producers, and service providers in the United States and abroad.

6. Technological and Procedural Suitability

The majority of digital content in the collections at ICPSR consists of social science research data, documentation required to use and understand the data, and associated files. Upon receipt of a deposit, ICPSR processes the digital content to ensure that confidential information has not been included, corrects errors in the data, fills gaps in the documentation, and produces dissemination versions of the data. Technicians also digitize documentation that is received only in hard copy format. ICPSR archives both the original digital content as received and the normalized dissemination versions in addition to any superseded versions of data that were previously disseminated. The archived files enable ICPSR to generate new access copies of data over time and support the authenticity and integrity of those dissemination versions. For files submitted on physical storage media, ICPSR makes archival copies but does not preserve the original transmission media. To ensure that data are usable and understandable, metadata and associated documentation align with the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standard, in which ICPSR has played a leading role since its inception.

ICPSR's primary digital preservation strategies, bitstream preservation and normalization, are defined in the Preservation Commitment Policy. All files that are deposited with and accepted by ICPSR will receive "bitstream preservation," which means preserving the data exactly as-is with periodic checksum comparisons to make sure digital files are not corrupted or altered. For curated data collections, ICPSR commits to selecting and preserving the content, structure, and context of certain file formats through normalization. Normalization produces standardized file formats for data and documentation that are well-documented and widely-used, thereby minimizing digital preservation overhead while ensuring the availability of data. ICPSR is investigating appropriate preservation strategies for the expanding range of digital content types (such as GIS or video) in its collections.

7. System Security

The systems and associated processes used by ICPSR ensure the security and integrity of its data collections. Thus, ICPSR's automated deposit form establishes the authenticity of digital assets by requiring a verified user account along with detailed information. Likewise, processing procedures for digital content affirm the accuracy and completeness of digital content through the careful comparison of the documentation and data as submitted and via the generation of thorough and rich metadata. The authenticity and integrity of digital content is confirmed through the active and ongoing use of checksums from the point of receipt onward. ICPSR enhances data collection security through comprehensive disaster recovery plans, regular reviews and audits of archival storage, and the maintenance of five copies of content distributed across diverse geographic areas and technologies. Security is also enforced via infrastructure and procedures for managing and providing access to collections containing sensitive data. Restricted-Use Data Management guidelines detail ICPSR?s adherence to strict legal requirements as well as the graduated system of data access that protect human subjects, in which access rules and methods vary based on the level of risk, with each method having its own application process and requirements.

8. Procedural Accountability

As a member organization with a service orientation and as a proponent of good digital preservation practice, ICPSR is committed to transparency in its policies and operations and has established a program to develop, promulgate, and maintain a comprehensive set of policies, procedures, and protocols.

8.1 Audit and Transparency

ICPSR is committed to an ongoing self-assessment and improvement process that aligns policies and practice at ICPSR with the Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC) requirements that were revised and incorporated into the ISO/DIS 16363 (CCSDS 652-R-1). ICPSR has participated in external audits since 2006; it is a CoreTrustSeal certified data repository. ICPSR is committed to a three-year cycle of self-assessment to evaluate, measure, and adjust the policies, procedures, preservation approaches, and practices of the digital preservation function. Current ICPSR policies are available on the ICPSR website or may be made available upon request.

8.2 Policy Framework Administration

This digital preservation policy framework was initially completed in April 2007; approved by the ICPSR Directors Group on May 1, 2007; and approved by the ICPSR Council at the June 2007 meeting. ICPSR reviews the framework every two years to ensure that it remains current and comprehensive as the digital preservation function at ICPSR evolves. Recommended changes, when rising to the level of major revisions, will be brought to Council for their approval. Each new version of the policy published on the Internet will carry a version number and a date stamp.

8.3 Definitions

The Glossary of Social Science Terms is available on the ICPSR website and provides definitions of terms used in this digital preservation policy framework as well as ICPSR's overall digital preservation activities.