Preservation Strategic Plan

The purpose of the Scholars Portal Preservation Strategic Plan is to outline the preservation strategy used by Scholars Portal to ensure continued access to its collections by the Designated Community.

Objectives: The primary focus of Scholars Portal’s preservation activities is on preserving the intellectual content of the materials acquired and ingested into the repository. This means that SP will prioritize the preservation of the content of all materials ingested, as opposed to the look and feel of the document.

The following properties are those which will be prioritized in all preservation activities:

Secondary considerations in preservation include the following items. While not strictly a part of the intellectual content of the preservation object, these properties are necessary to ensure its preservation and as such must be tracked as well.

The preservation of the above properties will be carried out using a transformative approach. That is, the formats (both at the file level and the metadata level) used in the repository will be constantly monitored (per the Environmental Monitoring of Preservation Formats policy) in order to ensure their suitability to long term preservation. In instances where a format is deemed to present an unacceptable level of risk to the long-term viability of the content, an appropriate successor format will be chosen, with input from the Designated Community, and all materials in the existing format in question will be migrated over. Given Scholars Portal's mission of providing access to OCUL-licensed scholarly material, additional transformations may be made on the material in order to increase its findability. Such transformations will never be made in such a way as to endanger the long-term preservation of the material, and in situations where this would occur, the material so transformed will not be considered as part of the preservation plan.

Scope: Scholars Portal commits to preserving the materials for which it has accepted responsibility to the greatest degree possible. However, there are a number of criteria necessary to the repository’s ability to carry out this mission. In order to provide some level of preservation on materials for which not every criteria is met, SP has defined multiple preservation levels, which indicate a level of preservation behaviours that SP will use upon the content in question. For additional information on preservation levels, see the Preservation Implementation Plan.

The criteria to be assessed when determining preservation level include:

Compliance with all of these criteria is necessary for an object to be subject to the full extent of preservation activities, as defined in the Preservation Implementation Plan. Failure or partial compliance does not necessarily mean that an object cannot be ingested into the repository, but an inability to meet these criteria will result in the use of a less robust preservation plan.

Review & Revision: Scholars Portal commits to the review and revision of its preservation practices and the corresponding documentation, as outlined in the Review Cycle Policy.