Digital Preservation Support Policy

Committed to building and maintaining collections for the use of students, academics, scholars, and the public long into the future, Busitema University assumes an obligation to ensure long-term access to the materials deposited into BDEARS and their intellectual content, but also acknowledges the inherent challenges involved in preserving digital content.

To this end, the BDEARS Digital Preservation Support Policy defines the categories of preservation support available and provides specific information about where different file formats fit within these categories. This policy is subject to change as new and emerging technologies impact our ability to preserve deposited content.

The University’s ability to preserve digital objects deposited in BDEARS is dependent, among other things, on whether the file format used:

  1. Is openly documented (more preservable) or proprietary (less preservable);
  2. Is supported by a range of software platforms (more preservable) or by only one (less preservable);
  3. Is widely adopted (more preservable) or has low use (less preservable);
  4. Is lossless data compression (more preservable) or lossy data compression (less preservable); and;
  5. Contains embedded files or embedded programs/scripts, like macros (less preservable).

All digital objects deposited to BDEARS will receive basic, "bit-level" preservation. Basic preservation means that BDEARS will preserve the viability of the original object through:

  1. ensuring that the bitstream (the 1s and 0s that make up the digital file) remains exactly the same over time;
  2. assigning a persistent, permanent identifier;
  3. creating preservation metadata;
  4. maintaining onsite and offsite backup copies;
  5. performing regular virus and file corruption checks; and
  6. performing periodic refreshments by copying files to new storage media.

Basic preservation does not ensure that a digital object may be opened by a computer program or is understandable by a human in the future. For example, in 2006 a scholar deposits a conference presentation in the Microsoft PowerPoint format (.ppt), a proprietary format. In 2030, a graduate student would like to view that conference presentation, but the software program - Microsoft PowerPoint - used to open and read .ppt files has been discontinued since 2020. Old versions of the software program are difficult to find, and, because the .ppt file format had never been publicly documented, there exist no other software programs to open the file. Even though the original digital object (the conference presentation in .ppt) is still technically viable, it is no longer renderable (able to be opened by a computer program), and thus not understandable by the graduate student in 2030.

Therefore, for digital objects that meet certain criteria (see below), BDEARS will strive to preserve not only the viability of the object but also the renderability and the understandability of the content of the digital object, as well as the original file itself. In the case of some objects in proprietary formats, this will mean that in addition to the original digital object, BDEARS will also save a copy of the object transformed into a file format that is more preservable than the original. For example, the conference presentation in .ppt might also be saved as a .pdf/a object (an open, publicly documented standard). The .pdf/a object is a more preservable format than the .ppt format. What may be lost is the full functionality of the original digital object. For example, the graduate student in our example may not be able to view the conference presentation as a slide show as the Microsoft PowerPoint software program allows. However, the content of the conference presentation will be preserved.

BDEARS also recognizes that in some cases an access copy of a digital object is necessary due to the proprietary nature or cost of the software used to render it. For example, a Microsoft Word document is reliant on the Microsoft Word program to render it; BDEARS will also provide a .pdf version of the document because .pdf readers are freely and readily available. In some cases, the access copy and the preservable copy may be the one and the same - a .pdf/a version, for example.