Stratigies Policies for Digital Preservation

Abstract

An increasing number of institutions throughout the world face legal obligations or business needs to collect and preserve digital objects over several decades. Today, a range of tools exist today to support the variety of preservation strategies such as migration or emulation. Yet, different preservation requirements across institutions and settings make the decision on which solution to implement very difficult. This paper provides an approved way to make informed and accountable decisions on which solution to implement in order to optimally preserve digital objects for a given purpose. It is based on Utility Analysis to evaluate the performance of various solutions against well-defined requirements and goals. The viability of this approach is shown in several case studies for different settings. We present its application to two scenarios of web archives, two collections of electronic publications, and a collection of multimedia art. This work focuses on the different requirements and goals in the various preservation settings.