Introduction

Introduction

This Catalogue of Policy elements is part of the SCAPE Policy Framework developed  to support the preservation functions Planning and Watch to make use of  automated policy compliant workflows.

The Policy Framework consists of three levels going from  a high level abstract view of preservation within an organisation to a more defined description of policy intent through to concrete applicable statements which can support automated workflow. 

By connecting these three levels we intend to make the creation of a preservation policy for organisations more straightforward and enable them to be better prepared for machine readable policies in the future.

This Catalogue addresses the description of policy intent  aspect of the framework.

Writing your own policies

This Catalogue of Policy Elements was also developed to support organisations in the creation of their own set of preservation policies and is based on literature and real life, publicly available preservation policies.

Policies are important and essential  to have:

• They will help to raise awareness and guide various parts of the organisational staff in their activities related to digital preservation.

• They will be an useful instrument in the everyday work of preservation professionals.

• They will support decision making,  help to choose the right preservation actions and will support the quality assurance of these actions. 

The users and the producers of the preserved collections will benefit if they can read the preservation policies, as these will give them an overview of what to expect from an organisation (what will be preserved, for how long, how will it be accessible etc.). 

Needless to say that also colleagues in digital preservation can benefit from reading the preservation policies of other organisations. 

You're encouraged to add your preservation policies to the collection of these that can be found here. 

Feedback encouraged

Although the focus of the SCAPE project was mainly on libraries, data centers and web archives, we think that the Catalogue will be of use for all kinds of organizations as a starting point.

But we also realize that this Catalogue is not yet complete. The current set of policy elements will be subject of changes and additions. 

Digital preservation is a relatively new topic and the insights on “how to do” digital preservation will change as the approaches will get more mature.

Developments in various areas like different types of objects to preserve, different responsibilities in who will preserve what  and a growing maturity in the approaches to choose from, will lead to extensions and perhaps deletions in the current set of policy elements.

We would like to encourage you to give feedback and suggestions for improvements or new elements that seems to be missing in the Catalogue. You can use the Add Comment field at the end of the page.

The SCAPE project will end in September 2014. At least until that time this wiki will be regularly updated when relevant.