New DRS Policy Guide

August 04, 2019

On July 26, 2019, Harvard Library Preservation Services staff held an open meeting in the Lamont Forum Room to present the new Policy Guide for the Digital Repository Service (DRS), HL’s centrally supported digital preservation infrastructure. Stephen Abrams, Head of Digital Preservation, and Tricia Patterson, Digital Preservation Analyst, described and answered questions about the new policy statement for 45 attendees from across HL. A clear and comprehensive policy guide is fundamentally important for any effective preservation activity, as it is the primary public mechanism for asserting core HL obligations and intentions, setting realistic service expectations on the part of stakeholders, and forming a rational basis for subsequent programmatic evaluation.

The DRS began operation in 2000 and currently preserves and provides access to more than 9.9 million digital works spanning a wide range of genres and formats (e.g., text, document, email, web, audio, still image, biomedical image, moving image, etc.), comprising 100 million individual digital files totaling 437 TB in size. The latest Guide is the fourth version, and the first major substantive revision, since the DRS’s inception. It is available for review from the Digital Preservation Services wiki.

As introduced by Abrams and Patterson, the Guide is structured as a multi-part document presenting a summary overview, general context and principles, specific prescriptive guidance, and a detailed glossary and narrative examples, respectively, regarding policy terms. The summary overview distills these terms into three high-level policy imperatives:

Curated content of persistent value furthering the mission of the University may be contributed to the DRS by institutional units and sponsored individuals.
Content receives the highest level and longest term of service consistent with its pertinent formal characteristics, curatorially appraised value, and HL and HUIT Library Technology Services capacities and priorities.
Managers, administrators, contributors, and consumers act with integrity, transparency, and accountability to each other and stakeholder communities within and outside the University.

The Guide subsequently emphasizes that digital preservation is a complex of actors, policies, procedures, and technology facilitating meaningful human communication across time and concomitant technical and cultural distance, which is achieved by assuring the ongoing integrity, authenticity, accessibility, and usability of stewarded digital resources.

Abrams and Patterson ended the session with a short look at upcoming activities and plans for the digital preservation program, including the release of the Electronic Archiving System (EAS) for email as open source and opening up EAS for use across all HL units; continued support for web archiving activity across HL; and adding DRS support for forensic disk images and architectural/CAD data, providing annual preservation assessments to all DRS curators and collection managers, completing requirements for a new simplified deposit system, planning with LTS for the 2021 refresh of the DRS’s storage hardware, consulting with the Audio Visual Stewardship Advisory Group on plans for mass A/V digitization, and developing a comprehensive multi-year roadmap for the DRS’s future.

By Stephen Abrams, Head of Digital Preservation