This document discusses improving preservation policies for digital archives. It notes that while standards reference preservation policies, they provide little guidance. The SCAPE project developed a catalogue of policy elements and analyzed over 50 existing policies. The analysis found policies to be heterogeneous and not always practical for internal stakeholders. To improve policies, the document recommends using the SCAPE catalogue as a guideline and introducing a capability maturity model to help make policies more trustworthy and reflective of organizational capabilities.

1. Preservation policies: how to improve them?
Barbara Sierman KB-NL
iPRES 2014, Melbourne 9 october 2014

2. Overview
iPRES 2014, Melbourne 9 october 2014 Barbara Sierman: Improving preservation policies
•Preservation Policies in standards
•SCAPE Catalogue of Policy elements
•Preservation Policies in practice
•How to improve?

3. About Preservation Policies
iPRES 2014, Melbourne 9 october 2014 Barbara Sierman: Improving preservation policies
Standards:
•Briefly mentioned in OAIS
•More in ISO 16363 Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories “The preservation policy then declares the range of approaches that the repository will employ to ensure preservation […]”
•But no further guidance…

4. SCAPE results
iPRES 2014, Melbourne 9 october 2014 Barbara Sierman: Improving preservation policies
Policy Framework
Catalogue of Policy Elements
See: http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/SP/Catalogue+of+Preservation+Policy+Elements

5. SCAPE results
iPRES 2014, Melbourne 9 october 2014 Barbara Sierman: Improving preservation policies
Published Preservation Policies http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/SP/Published+Preservation+Policies
•More than 50 policies
•Variety of organizations
•Focus SCAPE on Libraries, Web Archives and Data Centers

6. Analysis published preservation policies
iPRES 2014, Melbourne 9 october 2014 Barbara Sierman: Improving preservation policies
•Heterogeneous set of policies
•Reason for creating policies often: the external stakeholders
•Seems less intended for internal stakeholders
•Different granularity / levels (not consistent)

7. Analysis published preservation policies
iPRES 2014, Melbourne 9 october 2014 Barbara Sierman: Improving preservation policies
•Almost all will use OAIS as guideline
•Almost all aim integrity and authenticity
•Striking resemblance in wording
•Use of tools that are not up to date
•Reference to use of registries that in practice don’t exist or work properly (GDFR)
•Promise to update policy regularly, not done (since 2004)

8. Analysis published preservation policies
iPRES 2014, Melbourne 9 october 2014 Barbara Sierman: Improving preservation policies
•Gap between theory and practice:
•Not always about “approaches”
•Not always “understandable” and “implementable” How bad is this?
•Not helpful for internal stakeholders
•Might lead to ad hoc decisions
•Does raise expectations: reputation risk

9. Capability Maturity Model C. Dollar
iPRES 2014, Melbourne 9 october 2014 Barbara Sierman: Improving preservation policies

10. How to improve the preservation policies?
iPRES 2014, Melbourne 9 october 2014 Barbara Sierman: Improving preservation policies
•Use the SCAPE Catalogue of Policy Elements as a guideline
•Introduce a maturity level model in digital preservation
•Use this model to identify related policies
•Add this to the SCAPE Catalogue of Policy Elements

11. To summarize:
iPRES 2014, Melbourne 9 october 2014 Barbara Sierman: Improving preservation policies
•There is a gap between theory and practice
•Introducing maturity levels for organisations will
•make policies more trustworthy
•reflect reality
•help establishing trust in preservation Join me in improving this! Barbara.Sierman@kb.nl