1. Catherine Jones
Science and Technology Facilities Council
DPC Advanced Practitioners Course
University of Glasgow, 17th July 2013
Digital Preservation Policy
Why is it needed for SCAPE watch and planning
tools?

2. What is policy?
• Policy is the written representation of the aims and
objectives of an organisation.
• It sets the environment for all other activities being
undertaken.
• It is influenced by many things: political,
environmental, technical, financial and legal issues.
• It can be hard to make policy in a new & developing
area – such as Digital Preservation
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3. What is digital preservation policy?
• The organisation’s aims and objectives about the
long term care of digital objects:
• Preservation strategies and acceptable actions
• Decision about the digital objects (formats, significant
properties etc)
• Who the material is being preserved for
• Resourcing
• Responsibilities
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4. Part of wider policy landscape
IT
infrastructure
policy
Digital
preservation
policy
Organisational
Resourcing
policy
Collection
Management
policy
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5. The role of policy in planning and watch
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6. SCAPE Policy Levels
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Guidance
High level
General objectives
Applies to all parts of
the organisation and
collections
Written in natural
language to be read
by a human being
Preservation
Procedure
More detailed level
General approaches
Written in natural
language to be read
by a human being
Control
Specific, measurable
objectives
Applies to specific
collections or formats
In two forms: natural
language and
machine readable
form (RDF)

7. Guidance policy
• This will be at a high level that a Director of an
organisation would understand. Topics:
• Preservation goals & strategies of an organization
• Designated Community/Stakeholders
• Digital Objects
• Metadata
• Authenticity
• Rights
• Standards
• Organisation
• Storage
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8. Preservation Procedure
• Preservation Procedure: Natural language human
readable policy which may encompass the whole
organisation or may be focused on a particular
collection or material type depending on the needs
of the particular organisation
• SCAPE outcome in this area will be information and
guidance on how to construct this level of policy and what
factors need to be taken into consideration when
composing it for areas of particular interest in watch and
planning.
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The list of suitable data formats for digital preservation will be based on the following criteria:
• Openness of the format: Is the format well described and is documentation available? Is
the format subject to any patents? Is a licence or permission required to use the format?
• Distribution of the format: Is the format used widespread? Will many programmes be able
to understand the format?
• Error tolerance of the format: Will a single bit error make the whole file unreadable? Has
the format been compressed (lossless or lossy data compression)?
• Acceptance of the format as a preservation format: How is the format evaluation on
corresponding lists of recommended formats?
• Dependency of the format of external sources of information, for example fonts or pictures
with external references.
• Ability of the format to embed data in other formats, for example embedding of video in a
pdf-file.
Based on these criteria the owner of the digital collections can add a data format to the list as
“Recommended” and “Accepted”.

9. Control
• These are statements derived from the Preservation
Level, which are in both a human readable and
machine-readable form.
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Model links a particular content set
(collection) with a particular user
community (specific requirements) with
specific measurable objectives which can
be tested automatically

10. Stage 2: Policy statements
within the whole policy
1. Clarification of implicit
meaning
2. Identification of control
policy preservation case
3. Identification of objectives
4. Generate control statements
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Stage 1: Whole policy activities
1. Identify the content set the
policy addresses
2. Identify the user
communities/roles required
by the policy
3. Map policy statements to
high level concepts.
Creating Control policy statements
This work was partially supported by the SCAPE Project.
The SCAPE project is co‐funded by the European Union under FP7 ICT‐2009.4.1 (Grant Agreement number
Stage 3: Review the Preservation Cases and identify any
rationalisation required

11. Worked Example
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“3.1.1 All raw data will be curated in well-defined formats for which the means of
reading the data will be made available by the Facility”
Express some of the implicit information and rewrite to:
• “All data curated will be in well-defined formats”
• “Approved well-defined formats will be able to be read”
• “The reader will be supplied by at least the ISIS Facility”
Also need to express what “curated” means
Goals/Objectives:
1. File format must be of an approved format for the contentset
2. The file format should have documentation
3. Any instrument specific schema should be documented
4. There should be at least one piece of software which can read the files
5. This file reader should be available from the organisation holding the data
6. This file reader should be able to be used by the designated user
community
7. The file format should be able to be validated
8. Fixity checks should be undertaken
Using the contentset 2011 LET Calibration and a user community of domain
specific researchers
i. The file reader MUST be available to the designated user community
Using the contentset 2011 LET Calibration and a user community of ISIS data
managers
i. File format MUST be NeXus
ii. The file format MUST have documentation
iii. Any instrument specific schema MUST be documented
iv. Nexus File reader software available > 1
v. NeXus file reader MUST be located at STFC
vi. The file format MUST be able to be validated
vii. Fixity checks MUST be able to be undertaken

12. Conclusion
• Having explicit policy in natural language is important
• Expressing policy in machine testable ways is more
complex but can bring benefit through use of tools
• Points to note:
• natural language preservation procedure policy defining
acceptable states in statements but control level defining
measurable attributes in questions
• Written policy is at a fairly abstract level and practicalities may be
addressed in implementation plan/job procedure document or
one-off project plan
• Implicit information understood by human audience which needs
explicitly expressing for computers
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13. Thank you
• Partners in the work package are Barbara Sierman
(KB & lead); Gry Elstrom (SB); Sean Bechhofer
(University of Manchester) and Catherine Jones
(STFC)
• Any further questions about SCAPE policy
Catherine.jones@stfc.ac.uk
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