Digital preservation policy

At the International Conference "Preservation of Digital Information in the Information Society: Problems and Perspectives", held in Moscow from October 3-5, 2011, the final document of the Conference, the Moscow Declaration on Digital Preservation, was unanimously adopted. The Declaration highlights the importance of the issues raised at the conference and provides a set of actions and efforts to be taken in areas such as policy, awareness and education, scientific research, economics, ICT industry, collaboration and coordination.

The Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher bases its digital preservation policy on the guidelines established by the aforementioned conference and those indicated by the International Institute for Educational Research and Technological Development INDTEC, C.A., sponsor of the Scientific Journals, through digital preservation methods. This ensures the intellectual content of electronic archival documents for long periods of time, maintaining their attributes: integrity, authenticity, unalterability, originality, reliability and accessibility; in other words, they remain usable and unaltered over time.

Differences between preservation and backup

It should be understood that digital preservation is different from backups. What is to be preserved is not the same as what is to be stored as a backup copy. In this sense, it is conceptualized:

Backups are a protection against catastrophic events. What is backed up in a digital library are basically two objects: on the one hand, the information published on the server (digital resources plus catalog information) and, on the other hand, the digital resources being edited. Backup copies can follow different methods: full copy, incremental copy or rotating copies, for example, and the periodicity is generally high (daily or weekly).

Digital preservation, however, is concerned neither with backing up server data nor daily working material, but with safeguarding high quality digital resources that will be needed in the future; a public access library is created with automatically generated formats. In this regard, the method is usually the integral recording of the material once a year or every year and a half on a new medium (rejuvenation).

In both cases, data integrity control mechanisms are used at the time of making the copies, through redundancy algorithms that verify that the data are maintained as they have been recorded.

In this sense, Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher conditions digital integrity since, on the one hand, it has diagnosed the possible causes of defects in digital information or data loss such as: management errors and negligence, technical and mechanical failures, operator errors, viruses, unauthorized and undocumented changes, software obsolescence or incompatibility, loss of programs, incomplete metadata, aging of information. On the other hand, it has developed a digital preservation strategy that integrates the following procedures:

  • Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher stores digital resources with great care.
  • Self-documentation. Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher preserves the information without reference to external documentation.
  • Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher does not depend on systems, data or documentation.
  • Documentation of the type of content. Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher uses the digital preservation system LOCKSS (http://www.lockss.org/), from Stanford University. This offers digital preservation services, in open source, with the objective of providing and permanently preserving access to digital content generated through our publication. In addition, it allows digital content to be shared securely among participating libraries.
  • Hybrid approach. Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher uses this typology in order not to assume a reductionist position in the face of a phenomenon of conspicuous importance on a global scale.
  • Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher guarantees that there is more than one copy in the computer and another in the rest of the computers of the American Technoscientific Publishing House.
  • Every five years Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher transfers data to new storage media.
  • Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher packages the information to be preserved together with descriptive metadata.
  • Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher allows the original software to be used without the need for the original system that ran it to continue to exist. Emulation forces the preservation of a significant amount of information. Academic Synergy preserves the emulator, the operating system, the application and the data.
  • Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher converts the information to new formats. It is a measure against obsolescence.
  • Digital archeology. Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher applies a process of information recovery from damaged, fragmented or archaic data sources. It is the remedy when due precautions have not been taken and the information has been damaged.
  • Digital formats. Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher stores information in formats that are widely used today. This increases the probability that when a format becomes obsolete there are still programs for its conversion, we use: EPUB, XML and PDF.

In summary, Editorial Tecnocientífica Americana publisher performs systematic preservation actions, such as: data rejuvenation, consistency checks, migration, emulation, technology preservation and digital archeology.