Digital Preservation Policies

The Ecuadorian Society for Scientific Research, sponsor of the scientific journal PROciencias, uses digital preservation methods to ensure the intellectual content of archival electronic documents for extended periods, maintaining their attributes such as integrity, authenticity, immutability, originality, reliability, and accessibility.

Differences between preservation and backups

It is important to understand that digital preservation is different from backups. What needs to be preserved is not the same as what needs to be backed up.

Backups are a protection against catastrophic events (such as a hard drive failure or data loss due to power outages). What is backed up in a digital library basically consists of two things: on the one hand, the information published on the server (digital resources plus catalog information), and on the other hand, the digital resources in the editing process.

Digital preservation, however, is not concerned with backing up server data or daily work materials, but rather with safeguarding the high-quality digital resources we will need in the future, creating a publicly accessible library with automatically generated formats.

Backups can follow various known methods: full backups, incremental backups, or rotary backups, for example, and are generally performed frequently (daily or weekly).

In the case of preservation copies, on the other hand, the method is usually to record the entire material once and then copy it once a year or every year and a half onto a new storage medium (rejuvenation).

*In both cases, data integrity control mechanisms are used when making the copies, employing redundancy algorithms that verify that the data remains exactly as it was recorded.

Defining preservation policies:

Digital preservation should be established as an institutional responsibility and a commitment of all personnel. The Ecuadorian Society for Scientific Research addresses the following questions: What to save and why? Where to save it? How long to save it? How to find it later? How to keep it unaltered? And how to prevent it from becoming obsolete?

“Digital collections with lasting value must be created.”

Some of the possible causes of defects in digital information or data loss are: management errors and negligence, technical and mechanical failures, operator errors, viruses, unauthorized and undocumented changes, software obsolescence or incompatibility, program loss, incomplete metadata, and data aging.

Preservation Procedures

In compliance with its Preservation Policies, the Ecuadorian Society for Scientific Research adheres to the following implemented procedures:

The storage of digital resources with the utmost care.

Evaluations of preservation strategies such as data rejuvenation, data consistency checks, migration, emulation, technology preservation, and digital archaeology.
Encapsulation of the information to be preserved along with descriptive metadata.
Self-documentation, understanding and encoding the preserved information without reference to external documentation.
Self-sufficiency, minimizing dependencies on systems, data, or documentation.
And documentation of the content type, with a view to enabling future users to find or implement software that allows them to view the preserved information.